Hello, Perhaps a bit of historical context can explain some of the licensing. I also do not have the time to go down the mailing digests to to in-line answers. Please bear with me, I will do the best I can in answering the issues I remember over the past several days.
o Why have licenses in the first place? Before copyright was applied to software, it was typically either public domain or protected by contract law. Computers were very expensive and so was commercial software. My company once paid 100,000 USD for a single copy of a single compiler that went on a single system and could be used to compile one program at a time. And those were 1973 dollars. In the mid 1980s copyright could be assigned to software to protect it. However, for a person to legally use a piece of copyrighted software you had to be licensed. Universities like UC Berkeley and MIT did not want to write out (and sign) a license for every single person who wanted to use their code for free, and they did not want to be held liable to anyone using it, so they created the BSD and MIT licenses, which could be placed inside of the code and referenced on documentation. Of course these licenses are "permissive" in the fact they require the user to do very little to use the code. The GPL was also written so it would not require any signatures, nor take any liability, but was more "restrictive" since it spelled out a lot of conditions that the user had to agree with. It too could be put into the source code of the system or the documentation because there was lots of room on a tape or disk. o Why assign all rights of contributors to LPI? This is so LPI can license those contributions differently in the future. It is the difference between the GNU organization, that also has contributors assign their rights to the FSF and therefore can have the GPL change from 2.6 to 3.0, and the linux kernel which is is always stuck on GPL 2.x because Linus would have to get every copyright holder (and there are hundreds) to agree to the license change....and some of them are dead. o Why use Creative Commons (CC) instead of GPL? GPL is a complex license that relates to software. When CC was started by Dr. Lawrence Lessig it was to target media. He wanted a license mechanism that would meet the needs of its target audience, and yet not take up a lot of space or be disruptive to the media. Non Commercial No Derivatives Attribution There are more parts to the license, but these are written up at the Creative Commons website https://creativecommons.org/ and to not have to be spelled out in the media. Over time CC has become the de facto standard of media. Now let's look at it in the case of LPI and its StartIT materials. Attribution: LPI would like to have attribution for what it created. Likewise in its documentation it the art or on the website it can give attribution (if desired) to the people who contributed. Non Commercial: You should not be taking the materials, wrapping a cover around them and selling them through a store. If you did that with a copyrighted book you would be thrown in jail. As a creator I would be very angry if you took my work, just copied it, sold it for money and did not give me any. Or maybe not. Maybe I would not care. If I did not care I would mark it "free for commercial use". Why would an artist do this? Because they were not selling any copies of that art, and by having others sell it, it helps to attract people to their art that DOES sell. However you can use licensed, copyrighted books to teach a commercial course. Likewise you can use StartIT materials to teach a commercial course. No Derivatives - LPI does not want someone to take LPI's vetted book, put incorrect things in it and pass it off as LPI's materials. I have this same license block on every single one of my slides that I have shown for almost twenty years. I often use sarcasm in my slides and talks and someone taking a slide out of context could be used against me. All of this was done to make it as easy as possible for the artist and the person wishing to use the art as possible. If you DO want to use the works in some way that the license will not let you, you are welcome to go back to the copyright holder (in this case LPI) and get a modified license. Some people (very few) have done that with me and my slides/talks. I hope this explains a bit more about why LPI chose the CC licensing and what it really means. Warmest regards, Jon "maddog" Hall, Board Chair
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