Creative Commons is a nonprofit that offers copyright licenses for creative works. There are a wide variety of licenses to choose from, based on the principle of mixing and matching terms: no-derivatives, no-commercial, share-alike are all terms of cc licenses that may be mixed and matched to the author’s desire.

Many of the copyright licenses offered by Creative Commons are valid open source licenses, however some are not, notably the ‘non-commercial’ or ‘no-derivatives’ derivations.

The popular rival standard to creative commons licensing is the GNU Free Documentation License, a license created by the FSF for use in open source project documentation. This license is used by Wikipedia.

No Standard of Freedom

Unlike many open source software licenses, the Creative Commons stated objective is to protect the intent of the author in the allowed re-use of their creative works, rather than to promote re-use of works generally and to promote ‘free’ information that can be re-used by anyone.

This goal has attracted criticism, as it has led to some clauses which don’t promote re-use by anyone, such as the no-commercial clauses. Additionally the wide variety of licenses that cater to author desires means that many ‘creative commons’ licensed works are not compatible with each other.

Not Meant For Software

A CC license is not meant for licensing software or code. From the Creative Commons FAQ:

Creative Commons licenses are not intended to apply to software. They should not be used for software. We strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses available today. The licenses made available by the Free Software Foundation or listed at the Open Source Initiative should be considered by you if you are licensing software or software documentation. Unlike our licenses – which do not make mention of source or object code – these existing licenses were designed specifically for use with software.

Despite this, a number of projects use creative commons licenses. In the open source definition, only the share alike and attribution only clauses would be valid open source licenses. Noncommercial is not open source because it restricts fields of endeavor, and Noderivatives is not because it does not allow for modification.

External Links

• http://creativecommons.org