A potential customer just nudged me about our use of now deprecated CC licenses and a deprecated Public Domain dedication. We should really address these issues and upgrade our data licenses. We are currently using the following licenses:
- Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, share-alike ver. 2
- An old public domain dedication,
similar to this deprecated mark, from the CC Public Domain Dedication.
I propose that we move to:
The move to the CC license version 3 allows us to use the latest and most robust version of the Creative Commons license. If you’d like lots more detail on what this change means, please read the CC version 3 license “brief” explanation.
The CC0 grant improves a number of aspects of our old Public Domain dedication, especially in jurisdictions outside the US. Our current dedication isn’t sufficient to renounce any copyright over the data in some countries. The CC0 grant is an improved version that maximizes the global coverage of our rejection of copyright for our data.
Summary in plain english: We’d like to move to updated, more robust licenses. We are not changing what data is available under which license, nor are we taking away any rights that end users already have.
If you have questions or comments, please post them here. If there are no objections to this change, I will make it effective with our May 15th release.
UPDATE: Fixed an incorrect link that Mike from the Creative Commons pointed out. Thanks Mike!