[Openfontlibrary] OFLB Wiki License Conclusion

[Dave Crossland]

Hi,

Conclusion:

I no longer see any issue contributing to a CC-BY-SA wiki.

Reasoning:

I'm something of a tourist in the Free Software and Typefae Design /
Font Development worlds, and this is the first project of either world
I've been really motivated to join.

So I apologise for my discussion (obsessing? ;-) about licenses and
"open source versus free software philosophy" because this is the
first time I'm dealing with the issues in practice.

One of the queries I've had is over the CC license of the OFLB wiki,
as I'd like the ability to remix with the wikipedia collective's
projects, especially www.wikibooks.org

My understanding is that to remix you need license compatibility,
because of the special meaning of 'combined work' in copyright law.
"Dual Licensing" or "Metalicensing" is a one way solution to this, but
it is messy and easily creates unmergable sandboxed branches.

But it looks like there is movement at the FSF [0] and at CC [1] to
make FDL and BY-SA compatible.

While maybe naieve, I have faith that this will happen, as more people
than just me must be facing the problem.

And it will be painless too, because the FSF and CC use an
underappreciated copyleft technique I'd call "automatic upgrade." [2]

"Each version of the License is given a distinguishing version number.
If the Document specifies that a particular numbered version of this
License "or any later version" applies to it, you have the option of
following the terms and conditions either of that specified version or
of any later version that has been published (not as a draft) by the
Free Software Foundation. If the Document does not specify a version
number of this License, you may choose any version ever published (not
as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation."
- Section 10 of http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

"You may distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly
digitally perform a Derivative Work only under the terms of this
License, a later version of this License with the same License
Elements as this License, or ..."
- Section 4b of http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/legalcode

I no longer see any issue contributing to a CC-BY-SA wiki like the OFLB's.

[0]: This has technique has lately been a source of concern for
proprietary interests, now that GPLv3 is patching their workarounds on
v2. I personally think its an underappreciated innovation that has
been quietly designed to pre-empt future workarounds and appears to
function perfectly :-)

[1]: While FSF makes the automatic upgrade optional by letting you
specify a version, as the Linux Kernel developers have, CC makes it
mandatory. And it not visible at all on the 'human readable' side. So
I wonder when people write "CC-BY-SA 2.0" they realise that actually
the legal text says any later version... :-)

[2]: I've seen it called other labels elsewhere and am not sure of a
canonical name. If you know it, let me know :-)

-- 
Regards,
Dave