Add Creative Commons licenses

[afeld]

The site only includes CC0, but would be great to include the others, or explain why (if?) they aren't appropriate for software projects.

[benbalter]

From the Creative Commons FAQ:

Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software?

We do not recommend it. Creative Commons licenses should not be used for software. We strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available. We recommend considering licenses made available by the Free Software Foundation or listed at the Open Source Initiative. Unlike our licenses, which do not make mention of source or object code, these existing licenses were designed specifically for use with software. Furthermore, our licenses are not compatible with the GPL, the most frequently used free software license.

Note that the CC0 Public Domain Dedication is GPL-compatible and acceptable for software. For details, see the relevant CC0 FAQ entry.

[haacked]

I agree, the Creative Commons site has a great license chooser for licensing non-code works. We ended up replacing CC0 in favor of the simpler UNLICENSE.

[afeld]

Sounds like it's more appropriate for #13 then. Thanks!

[eric-brechemier]

@haacked I understand the rationale for software, but I see a confusion between the goals stated and the actual usage on GitHub.

Since this repository is also used as a basis for the drop-down to select a license for new repositories on GitHub (GitHub support redirected me here), some of the Creative Commons license should be included: GitHub repositories are created for documentation, presentation slides, books, data sets and web sites (including choosealicense.com) for which Creative Commons licenses are a good match.

While the "No Derivative" options do not make sense for GitHub (no fork allowed), at least the most popular Creative Commons licenses should be included:

• CC-BY: Attribution
• CC-BY-SA: Attribution Share Alike
• CC-BY-NC-SA: Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike

Also, CC0 is recommended over Unlicense by the FSF for Public Domain:

If you want to release your work to the public domain, we recommend you use CC0.
CC0 also provides a public domain dedication with a fallback license,
and is more thorough and mature than the Unlicense.
— https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Unlicense

[iamnewton]

I see that this issue is closed, by @haacked, but this last point by @eric-brechemier seems a valid one. Any discussion on this?

Also, if I choose to fork a project on Github that is already using CC3.0, I am required to maintain that same license for the derivative work, and thus it would be nice to have that option as a drop-down when creating a new repository.

@hometot If you refer to CC0 or CC-BY 3.0, you're not required to keep the derivative work under the same license. OTOH, when you fork a project on Github, your fork has all files including the license of the original repository anyway, so it keeps it by default.

[davidamichelson]

I'd like to second the comment by @eric-brechemier. It seems counter-intuitive for github to limit the licenses available just because the imagined use case is for executable code. Github is also an excellent tool for storing encoded data (such as XML). The CC 3.0 licenses are a good fit for such non-executable code. Please add them as a default choice for a repository. (Afterthought: Given that Github now is used for hosting websites, it is a given that repositories will contain data/content that would take CC type licenses, so the choices should be updated to reflect that reality).

[haacked]

It seems counter-intuitive for github to limit the licenses available just because the imagined use case is for executable code.

Let's be clear, we're not limiting anything. You're free to put any license you want in there. We're just making it easier to add a software license. Consider the previous state of the world when we did nothing. I think what we do today is strictly better.

I agree that having CC licenses in the license chooser would be great. I think that's mostly a GitHub UX issue though. I'll re-open this so we can track it, but until we have time to come up with an approach on the GitHub.com side of things, we'll keep this tightly focused on code.

[davidamichelson]

@haacked Thank you, you are right that it is not really limited sorry to imply that (one can do as I did and make their own license file and paste in the CC 4.0 text. The convenience of having it in the chooser would be nice though. Thanks!

[haacked]

The convenience of having it in the chooser would be nice though. Thanks!

I hear you. :) I'll look into it. Can't promise it'll happen soon, but I think it's something I'd like to have happen eventually.