[Fsfe-ie] About using the cc-by-sa for ifso.ie

[Ciaran O'Riordan]

We recently got an enquiry about the licensing of ifso.ie content, but the
email had no reply address.  Maybe the person will see this mail.

This is a topic that was debated at length at a few IFSO meetings and within
the committee.  The solution we agreed on was to offer people two options
for licensing our content.  The first is the by-sa-2.5 Creative Commons
licence, and the second is: if you want to use our content under different
terms, just ask.

There's no licence that we all like, but we think it's important to offer a
licence so that people can modify and redistribute our work without having
to ask us (now or in future decades), and using an existing licence ensures
compatibility with other web pages etc.

The person who emailed us said that FSF generally disapproves of the
Creative Commons licence - but this is not entirely accurate.  FSF does not
support Creative Commons, but FSF acknowledges that some Creative Commons
licences are free licences (and some aren't, and FSF criticises that they
don't make a clear distinction).  Richard Stallman explains their position
here:
http://fsfeurope.org/documents/rms-fs-2006-03-09.en.html#q6

We're careful to say that we use the by-sa-2.5 licence, not "a Creative
Commons licence".


-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan __________________ \ http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3
http://ciaran.compsoc.com/ _________ \  GPLv3 and other work supported by
http://fsfe.org/fellows/ciaran/weblog \   Fellowship: http://www.fsfe.org