Hi,
Just so you know, on my list of things to do is revisiting the site-wide license.
I chose the Creative commons license because felt it was simple and straightforward. Granted I didn't spend nearly as much time researching licenses as I did researching patterns and prior art. While I'd used an awful lot of free software before, I hadn't ever actually taken the time to contribute any back to the community. That is to say I was a newbie at producing open source software, and essentially clueless at licensing it.
All I was concerned about was that it be free, that people be able to produce any sort of work with it at all and do what they want with it. I wanted to stipulate was that if the work was distributed in open form, the attribution be left in. For the most part CC Attribution 3.0 does what I wanted a license to do.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/says
You are free:
* to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
* to Remix — to adapt the work
Under the following conditions:
* Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.
* Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
* Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author's moral rights.
The 'manner specified by the author or licensor':
http://trac.puremvc.org/PureMVC/wiki/ManifoldProject/LicenseThen it became a community project, and I wanted to make sure that each project in the public repository was covered by the same license, and that the original author had attribution.
Thus far it hasn't been a huge problem. As far as I know no one has interpreted it as a license that restricts them from using it. But I have had to explain it a few times to make perfectly clear that there were no gotchas with doing a proprietary app based on it (there aren't) so I have come around to consider that perhaps another license would be better.
It's good that you open the issue as a thread like this and I hope others will join in, both contributors and users as to your thoughts on this. I want to make sure that this aspect of the project gets as much love as all the other bits fighting for attention.
Thanks,
-=Cliff>