Licenses

Why I needed to license use of stuff I'm giving away for free

Most of the material I have put on this website is free to use. However the UK (& most of the rest of the rest of the world) defaults to material being copyrighted and fully restricted unless specified otherwise. Hence I had to specify that it is free in order to make it free.

There is another catch. I want to keep it free but if I made it fully public domain then there would be the risk that someone else could freely copy it, make some small modification, make the modified version the one people have to use and making that non-free. A solution is 'copyleft' which is the use of conventional copyright ownership to prevent republication or derivative works that are not similarly free to share.

I have used some readymade licences because it saves me work, they have been carefully legally worded and are familiar to many people. I have used GPL & CC-by-sa. See the individual pages, programs etc. for which each is distributed under. I have used GPL a lot because it is long established and well known, even using it for documents where GFDL might be more optimised to the task, and CC-by-sa for artworks where GPL's requirement to make source code available might require people who use them to pass on full resolution copies of the image components they used and that would be (although desirable) inconvenient given the size of such files and the difficulty of applying to print distributions. I have also used CC-by-sa for some text works where the editing format I used (e.g. a mark-up language of my own) is too difficult for a large proportion of users.

My reason for insisting on attribution is mainly so that recipients can find their way back to the original material which might be of use to them. (Also, technically, the legal mechanism of copyleft uses copyright which in turn needs attribution.)

A pedantic note about the spelling: in UK English the noun is 'licence' ('license' is the verb); in USA English the noun is 'license' (& so is the verb). I am from the UK, the GPL & CC-by-sa creators were from the USA. Hence this page uses a mixture.

GPL

Full name:
GNU General Public License (version 2 or later)
Official master copy location:
GPL current master copy (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt)
Local copy:
GPL local copy (of version 3)
My summary:
You can copy, use, modify & redistribute materials provided under this license provided you similarly allow those who you redistribute to do likewise by providing it under to them under the same licence, and by not withholding the source code from them, and give credit to the author. It was originally intended for programs but can be applied to other items such as texts too. (Note that this summary is not legally binding. It is merely intended to be a helpful summary of the GPL legal text which is legally binding.) It is well known as the classic open source software licence.

CC-by-sa

Full name:
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
Official master copy location:
CC-by-sa master copy (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)
My summary:
You can copy, use, modify & redistribute materials provided under this licence provided you similarly allow those who you redistribute to do likewise by providing it under to them under the same licence and give credit to the author. (Note that this summary is not legally binding. It is merely intended to be a helpful summary of the CC-by-sa legal text which is legally binding.) It is well known as the main licence for Wikipedia pages.