Open Publication License

Open Publication License was created by the Open Content Project in 1999 as public copyright license for documents.[1] The license was superseded in 2003/2007 by the Creative commons licenses.[2]

History

The Open Publication License replaced in 1999 the previous Open Content License from 1998.[3] Both the two licenses differ substantially: The Open Publication License is not a share-alike license while the Open Content License is and the Open Publication License can optionally restrict the distribution of derivative works or to restrict the commercial distribution of paper copies of the work or derivatives of the work, whereas the Open Content License forbade copying for profit altogether.

According to the Free Software Foundation,[4] the Open Publication License "can be used as a free documentation license" and is "a copyleft free documentation license provided the copyright holder does not exercise any of the 'LICENSE OPTIONS' listed in Section VI of the license." It is not, however, compatible with the GNU FDL.[4]

Since May 2007 the Open Content Projects recommends[2] instead using one of the Creative Commons licenses.

Reception

The Open Public License was analyzed in detail legal-wise by the author of Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing, Andrew M. St. Laurent, in 2004.[5] The license was accepted as a free content license according to the Free Cultural Works definition.[6]

Adoption

A major work which used the Open Publication License was Eric S. Raymond's book The Cathedral and the Bazaar in 1999.[7] Bruce Perens used the license for the Bruce Perens' Open Source Series of books.[8] Also the Fedora project used the license for their documentation until around 2009/2010 when they switched to a CC-BY-SA license.[9]

See also

References

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 6/19/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.