I am currently working on an open source PHP script and trying to adopt an attribution license. The ones that I found are
CC 3.0: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
and
CPAL 1.0: http://opensource.org/licenses/CPAL-1.0
They seems very similar to me. What’s the difference, pros and cons?
What I want is:
- Allow use for free and commercial work, modify it to suit their needs if required, but can not redistribute it as a new product or with a different name (no sublicensing?).
EDIT: I am bit confused about CPAL license on this, what does it allow and disallow? - Copyright info in the source codes can not be removed
- Copyright attribution on the frontend and backend (admin panel) can not be removed. But I will adopt dual licensing model by adding commercial license to allow removing them with a fee (only the frontend and backend, not the copyright info in the source codes).
- Any plugins or themes created for this script doesn’t need to adopt my license as long as the main source codes are not modified, it can be any license(commercial, MIT, GPL, CC, CPAL) adopted by the authors.
I think that’s basically it.
I am also open to suggestions for other kinds of license types and why
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From the Creative Commons FAQ:
Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software?
We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available. We recommend considering licenses made available by the Free Software Foundation or listed as “open source” by the Open Source Initiative. Unlike our licenses, which do not make mention of source or object code, these existing licenses were designed specifically for use with software. Furthermore, most of our licenses are currently not compatible with the GPL, the most frequently used free software license. (We are looking into compatibility of BY-SA with GPL in the future; for more detail, see the compatibility page.)
CC licenses may be used for software documentation, as well as separate artistic elements such as game art or music.
Note that the CC0 Public Domain Dedication is GPL-compatible and acceptable for software. For details, see the relevant CC0 FAQ entry.