On Fri, May 26, 2017 at 02:19:14PM -0700, W. Trevor King wrote: > Digging at this “acceptable” idea a bit more, I'm guessing it's > something like “adapters may share adapted works under”. But the SPDX > isn't just about copyleft (e.g. it includes CC-BY-ND-*). I think it > makes more sense to focus on licenses (just the text, e.g. GPL-2.0) > and license grants. For example, here are some SPDX License > Expressions translated into grants: > > * GPL-2.0: You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of > the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free > Software Foundation. > > * GPL-2.0+: You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms > of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software > Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any > later version. > > * CC-BY-SA-4.0: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons > Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. > > You can distribute an adaptation under a later version of the CC > BY-SA because that's part of the CC-BY-SA-4.0 [1]. > > * CC-BY-SA-4.0+: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons > Attribution 4.0 International License; either version 4.0 of the > License, or (at your option) any later version. > > The CC-BY-SA-4.0 tries to grant you that right anyway, but > regardless of how you read the CC-BY-SA-4.0, I'm granting you that > right directly.
CC BY-SA 4.0 implies that an adaptation can be licensed under a future CC BY-SA 5.0, but the original material can't. If one explicitly said some content was licensed under "CC BY-SA 4.0 or later", it might mean that the originally-received material can be distributed downstream under CC BY-SA 5.0. Thus CC-BY-SA-4.0+ does not mean the same thing as CC-BY-SA-4.0. The traditional GPL "or later" notice says clearly that the licensee can distribute the original under a later version of the GPL, and that's the concept that seems to be imported in the post-GPLv2/LGPLv2.0 copyleft "open source" licenses that have built-in or-later provisions. (What that actually means, as to unmodified code, may not be clear, which I speculate might be why Creative Commons makes a point of not saying there is any permission to distribute the original material under the later license). I don't know if that point makes a difference as to this discussion though. There might also be a problem with the way SPDX defines the '+', which as far as I know is this: "An SPDX License List Short Form Identifier with a unary"+" operator suffix to represent the current version of the license or any later version." This is *not* really the same as what the traditional GPL "or later" notice says, or is perhaps one of multiple possible legal interpretations of what the traditional GPL "or later" notice says (which I think goes against the whole SPDX philosophy of objective description of license texts). Richard _______________________________________________ Spdx-legal mailing list Spdx-legal@lists.spdx.org https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal
