"Sabrina Kilian" <ykg### [at] vtedu> wrote in message 
news:456b36c3@news.povray.org...
> Chris B wrote:
>> I therefore think we're probably down to picking from the list of 
>> available
>> Creative Commons licenses/certificates. Would anyone care to agree or
>> disagree with that?
>
> BSD and MIT licenses might also be an option, since they refer to source
> code, which SDL is, and binary form, which the final images would be. I
> didn't read them in their entirety, but I didn't see any references to
> 'program' or 'executable' in there.
>

These both seem good and short and I like the disclaimer, but they do seem 
to me still to be oriented towards application code. They both speak of 
software and although we could potentially draw parallels between software 
and SDL and between binaries and generated images, it does seem a bit like 
shoving a round peg in a square hole.
To me the Creative Commons vocabulary, such as 'work' and 'derivative work' 
seem to better fit what we create.

> www.opensource.org/licenses has several others that might work,
> depending on their wording. The Academic Free License looks wordy but
> seemed general enough to be used for everything.

There do seem to be quite a few  different licenses there to choose from. 
Would anyone like to do some homework on those?

>
> It seems like we are working backwards, going from established and known
> licenses and taking out the parts we don't need. Let's start from the
> ground and work up.
>

Good point. I think this list gives us an excellent way to compare the 
credentials of different licenses. I've tried to map the Creative Commons 
licenses against this list and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 
license seems to me to map pretty closely to what you've proposed.

>
> So, the issues I can think of are copyright, re-distribution of the
> include, giving credit, commercial use, and re-distributing it under
> another license.
>
> I don't think we can get rid of copyright. The person who writes each
> snippet of code would still have the right to give it away, sell it, do
> what ever they want with their piece of code.

Agreed. The original author would still have considerable rights, though 
they could not subsequently sell it under any 'exclusive' distribution 
agreement.
I think this leads into an issue that Nemesis has eluded to, that the 
release that we get the author to 'sign' when contributing the work under 
the terms of this license would have to be in perpetuity, otherwise they 
could change their minds later and cause no end of grief for people who had 
developed derivative works.

>
> I also think that the
> license should enforce the copyright notice in any re-packaged forms of
> the include. It's a license for use, not a contract for sale of the items.
>

This seems mostly consistent with the clause in the CC Attribution 
Share-Alike license that "lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work 
even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their 
new creations under the identical terms."
I assume this would mean they could modify your include with the same 
license on that include, but potentially a different license on other pieces 
of their own work that they distribute it with. I don't think this would 
stop them selling their work, which could include your work.

>
> I also think the library as a whole should encourage giving credit to
> the include and the author of the piece that is used, but I don't think
> it needs to be a term in the license. It might be easier to use an
> established license, but most of them enforce some display of copyright
> being kept with the include file.
>

The CC Attribution Share-Alike seems to cover that where they say they 
should 'credit you'

> Now, re-distributing the entire include seems the easy part. Anyone who
> downloads a copy should at least be able to pass it on under the same
> terms they license they received it. I think they should also be able to
> redistribute part of the include as well, since that would make
> publishing scene code. I don't think it is necessary for this include to
> force people using it to put any scene using it under the same license,
> like the GPL would.
>

From reading the CC Attribution Share-Alike, this seems to me to be covered 
by the clause for Collective Works. I think that cutting and pasting into 
another file would mean that the new file would have to come under the same 
license (being a derivative work), but the original include or the 
derivative work could be distributed as part of a group of files where the 
other files come under different licensing terms.

>
> Stuff like the BSD and Creative Commons Attribution licenses would allow
> them to then re-license it under any other license as well. That would
> solve any problem with commercial use, since all someone would have to
> do is re-license the library to them self under terms that would allow
> it. If Pixar thinks we can make a better glass of water then they can, I
> say we let them use it.
>
> What I don't like about the very open licenses is that ability to take
> the entire library and bury it in another program without even a mention
> of it being used. This gets back into the problem of distributing the
> code vs distributing the final work, but I would prefer to see this
> license keep the include free. I like the terms of the LGPL for this,
> but I'm not sure it could be tuned to non-executable use.
>

I think that the CC Attribution Share-Alike Clause 4c covers this quite well 
by requiring derivative works, which presumably includes graphics generated 
using your objects,  to include 'a credit identifying the use of the Work in 
the Derivative Work (e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original 
Author," or "Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author")' that 
appears "where any other comparable authorship credit appears and in a 
manner at least as prominent as such other comparable authorship credit".

>
> Finally, I did some more digging into GNU licenses and found the GFDL,
> Free Document License. It would take more reading but it might be
> possible to use something like that, similar to published computer
> books. "The text (and whole library) is licensed under GFDL, and code
> snippets (individual items or functions) are free to use in other
> programs without attribution."  I haven't had time to really read it
> yet, so that might not be possible, but now I'm going to check some
> O'Reilly books to see how they word code licenses.

The next closest is the Creative Commons Attribution License which is a more 
liberal license that just requires credit to be given for the work (and 
derivative works where reasonable), but allows subsequent redistribution 
under stricter licensing conditions. I don't think that the stricter license 
could subsequently stop people using the copy from povray.org, but could 
potentially prevent people from reusing some of the works derived from it.

Would anyone like to summarise how an alternative license maps to these 
proposed requirements.

Regards,
Chris B.

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