[Clipart] OpenPhoto project.

Bryce Harrington bryce at bryceharrington.com
Fri Aug 20 21:09:57 PDT 2004


On Fri, 20 Aug 2004, Alan Horkan wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Aug 2004, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> > I just wanted to let people know of a "sister" project.  The OpenPhoto
> > project:
> >
> > http://www.openphoto.tk/
> 
> They're a bit differnt from OpenClipArt.org
> 
> an extract from their license:
> http://opensource.org/licenses/afl-2.1.php
> 
> 6) Attribution Rights. You must retain, in the Source Code of any
> Derivative Works that You create, all copyright, patent or trademark
> notices from the Source Code of the Original Work, as well as any notices
> of licensing and any descriptive text identified therein as an
> "Attribution Notice." You must cause the Source Code for any Derivative
> Works that You create to carry a prominent Attribution Notice reasonably
> calculated to inform recipients that You have modified the Original Work.
> 
> Sincerely
> 
> - Alan

My 2cp on this.  

Every project is different.  The realities of some projects mean that
one license will work for it, whereas it would not work in others.

Clipart is a category where *any* licensing is a bad thing.  Clipart is
all about clipping and reusing in lots of different ways.  Licenses just
gets in the way.

Software is a different story.  Having some rules can be beneficial.
Depending on the goal of the Software, LGPL, GPL, BSD, or other licenses
can help it achieve its goals.

For photos, the rules may be quite different.  Where it's rare to see a
piece of clipart *with* its author's name, it's quite common to see
photos with their photographer's name.  In a way, for some photos,
having the photographer's name actually *enhances* the photo. 

So I don't think we should automatically apply philosophies we've worked
out for clipart to this other project.  This license may work very well
for them.  Personally, I would have liked to see them adopt a more
commonly used license such as GPL or whatever, but I assume they've put
a good deal of thought into it and picked a license that's a good
balance for their community.  If they didn't, well they won't be around
long anyway.  ;-)

Bryce



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