Licensing News & Articles

Licensing content can be a headache, especially for authors and developers who wish to use other persons' or groups' work in their own. While photo-sharing sites have long since advocated the use of Creative Commons licenses, the concept is gaining ground in videos, and YouTube (news, site) is set to announce the integration of Creative Commons in videos and the cloud-based YouTube video editor.

WordPress (news, site) made a small announcement today regarding whether or not the GPL applies to themes. 

WordPress refers to the GPL as their Bill of Rights, but we like to think of it as a free software license. The GPL is a popular licence that grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the free software definition, and uses copyleft to ensure the freedoms are preserved--even when the work is changed or added to.

Matt Mullenweg of WordPress writes, "We’ve always done our best to keep WordPress.org clean and only promote things that are completely compatible and legal with WordPress’s license." But just to be double sure, he recently consulted the Software Freedom Law Center for their opinion. Mullenweg's results were summed up on the WordPress blog in one simple line:

"PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required."

Of course, cutting out CSS and JavaScript from WordPress would get kind of hairy and horrible, so the final verdict from the WordPress team is that they will continue to only promote and host things on WordPress.org that are 100% GPL or compatible.

In order to recognize and celebrate a few of the folks creating 100% GPL themes as well as providing support and other services around them, WordPress has a new page listing GPL commercially supported themes here.

As we've mentioned previously, the Plone (news, site) community has been in discussions over a slight change to licensing policy. No, Plone is not changing licenses. It's sticking with the GPL.

However, Plone is now also offering the option for those building Plone Framework Components to apply for permission to use a modified BSD license for their components instead of the GPL.

This move is primarily meant to make it easier for componentized Plone code to interact with Zope and Python projects without causing GPL violations. Requests will be considered on a case-by-case basis for components that:

• Are in the plone.* namespace, not the plone.app.* namespace.
• Don't have imports from GPL-licensed code.

The primary developer/maintainer must be willing to ensure the component won't acquire dependencies on GPL-licensed code.

For the official description of the new policy and associated FAQs, see the Plone Framework Components Relicensing Policy document.

Apparently the open source crowd isn’t the only circle suffering from pinched toes, courtesy of Microsoft.

Becta, the education technology branch of the UK, has just filed a complaint with the Office of Fair Trading regarding Microsoft’s “anti-competitive practices” in the academic software license sector.

After months of grueling work and legal battles, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has officially approved the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) originally submitted by Socialtext nine months ago. With CPAL on the OSI’s approved list of open source licenses, Socialtext can now carry the OSI-certified label and proudly call itself open source.

When a large corporate body and a suburban teen can use the same platform to air a great idea or persuasive stream of thought, what protects one or the other from negligence of source citation or outright content theft? It’s harder to track information back to its origins when the origin itself can be added, edited, published and deleted on a whim.

Noting that the corporate machine might be slightly better able than the teen at navigating the complex world of content rights, Creative Commons came up with a solution as simple and fluid as the flow of information it is often meant to protect. And recently, the 3.0 version of said solution has been unwrapped.