Creative Commons & co. licenses and Codebeach
One of the most requested “features” for CodeBeach has been the ability to select some kind of CC licenses for submitted snippets and classes. The gist of it is being able to get an entry on the Credit.rtf file of the apps using code under said license. While i’m considering this, i still think is a bad idea for some reasons.
The request of an entry in the credit file looks innocent and easy to satisfy. As soon as you use 1 or 2 snippets/classes from the site, that’s it. But what happens if you need to use many classes from there? And what if they depend on many other classes as well? You end up having to track down dependencies and end up with a very long Credits.rtf file.
Obviously tracking down dependencies is a technical problem, which i can solve via technical means for the joy of you all, but still, do you really want long Credits.rtf files, and having to remember that each time you copy&paste a snippet you’re likely to add a name to it? (Or worse, you forgot you added that name already and end up with double entries).
Let me know guys, the site is for you and we are doing it just for passion, so if you really need to see your name on Credit files, so be it.
April 19th, 2007 at 21:31
I really like the idea that the code here is completely unencumbered.
Adding an attribution license option just complicates matters and for very little benefit.
April 20th, 2007 at 3:50
I understand people wanting to get credit, but I feel it’s against the spirit of free use to absolutely require a credit for every little snippet.
Actually, now that I think about it, Creative Commons Attribution licenses are incompatible with the GPL as well, so no code from there could be used in GPL/LGPL software.