Open Publication License

Last updated
Open Publication License
Author Eric S. Raymond, David A. Wiley, Tim O'Reilly [1]
Latest version1.0
Publisher Open Content Project
PublishedCurrent version:
June 08, 1999 [2]
SPDX identifierOPUBL-1.0
Debian FSG compatible No [3]
FSF approved Yes, under certain conditions (see below) [4]
OSI approved No [5]
GPL compatible No [4]

The Open Publication License (OPL) was published by the Open Content Project in 1999 as a public copyright license for documents. [2] It superseded the Open Content License, which was published by the Open Content Project in 1998. [1] Starting around 2002-2003, it began to be superseded, in turn, by the Creative Commons licenses. [1]

Contents

History

In 1998, the Open Content Project published a licence called the Open Content License, which was among the first (perhaps the first) public copyright licenses intended for content (i.e. documents) rather than for software. [1] [6] The following year, it published the Open Publication License, which was intended to be an improvement upon the Open Content License. [1]

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 restrict the commercial distribution of paper copies of the work or derivatives of the work, whereas the Open Content License forbids copying for profit altogether.

In June 2003, David A. Wiley, the founder of the Open Content Project, indicated that the Creative Commons licenses, which were developed in collaboration with lawyers, would be "more likely to stand up in court" than the Open Content Project licenses, which were not. [1] He also announced that for this reason, he was joining Creative Commons and shutting down the Open Content Project, and that users thinking of using an Open Content Project license would be "far better off using a Creative Commons license". [1]

Nomenclature

Confusingly, the Open Content License gives its abbreviation as "OPL" rather than "OCL", [6] and that license is sometimes referred to by the former initialism. [4] ("OPL", as used by the Open Content Project in 1998, stood for OpenContent Principles and License.) [7] Nevertheless, the license's author has subsequently referred to that license as the "OCL", and to the Open Publication License as the "OPL". [1] This ambiguity about the initialism "OPL" risks confusion, and the only sure way to know which of the two licenses is being referred to, in a given context, is to look for the full name. [4] [8]

Reception

According to the Free Software Foundation, 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." [4] It is not, however, compatible with the GNU FDL. [4]

In March 2004, the OPL v1.0 was determined by the Debian legal team to be incompatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines. [3]

In October 2004, an analysis of the Open Public License was published by Andrew M. St. Laurent, the author of Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing. [9]

Adoption

Eric S. Raymond's book The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999) was published under the Open Publication License. [10] Bruce Perens used the license for the Bruce Perens' Open Source Series of books. [11] The Linux Gazette used the Open Publication License. [12] Additionally, the Fedora project used the license for their documentation until approximately 2009-2010 when the project switched to a CC BY-SA license. [13]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bruce Perens</span>

Bruce Perens is an American computer programmer and advocate in the free software movement. He created The Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source. He co-founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) with Eric S. Raymond. Today, he is a partner at OSS Capital.

Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Content owners still maintain their copyright, but Creative Commons licenses give standard releases that replace the individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, that are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management.

The Open Content Project was a project dedicated to free culture and Creative Commons.

The Open Content License is a share-alike public copyright license by Open Content Project in 1998. The license can be applied to a work to make it open content. It is one of the earliest non-software free content licenses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Creative Commons license</span> Public copyright license for allowing free use of a work

A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open-source software</span> Software licensed to ensure source code usage rights

Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open-source software may be developed in a collaborative public manner. Open-source software is a prominent example of open collaboration, meaning any capable user is able to participate online in development, making the number of possible contributors indefinite. The ability to examine the code facilitates public trust in the software.

The Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) is a set of guidelines that the Debian Project uses to determine whether a software license is a free software license, which in turn is used to determine whether a piece of software can be included in Debian. The DFSG is part of the Debian Social Contract.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Share-alike</span> Condition in some free copyright licenses

Share-alike (🄎) is a copyright licensing term, originally used by the Creative Commons project, to describe works or licenses that require copies or adaptations of the work to be released under the same or similar license as the original. Copyleft licenses are free content or free software licenses with a share-alike condition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free-culture movement</span> Social movement promoting the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others

The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, by using the Internet and other forms of media.

This comparison only covers software licenses which have a linked Wikipedia article for details and which are approved by at least one of the following expert groups: the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, the Debian Project and the Fedora Project. For a list of licenses not specifically intended for software, see List of free-content licences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public-domain-equivalent license</span> License that waives all copyright

Public-domain-equivalent license are licenses that grant public-domain-like rights and/or act as waivers. They are used to make copyrighted works usable by anyone without conditions, while avoiding the complexities of attribution or license compatibility that occur with other licenses.

License compatibility is a legal framework that allows for pieces of software with different software licenses to be distributed together. The need for such a framework arises because the different licenses can contain contradictory requirements, rendering it impossible to legally combine source code from separately-licensed software in order to create and publish a new program. Proprietary licenses are generally program-specific and incompatible; authors must negotiate to combine code. Copyleft licenses are commonly deliberately incompatible with proprietary licenses, in order to prevent copyleft software from being re-licensed under a proprietary license, turning it into proprietary software. Many copyleft licenses explicitly allow relicensing under some other copyleft licenses. Permissive licenses are compatible with everything, including proprietary licenses; there is thus no guarantee that all derived works will remain under a permissive license.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free content</span> Creative work with few or no restrictions on how it may be used

Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information, is any kind of functional work, work of art, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free-software license</span> License allowing software modification and redistribution

A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder of a piece of software can remove these restrictions by accompanying the software with a software license which grants the recipient these rights. Software using such a license is free software as conferred by the copyright holder. Free-software licenses are applied to software in source code and also binary object-code form, as the copyright law recognizes both forms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU Free Documentation License</span> Copyleft license primarily for free software documentation

The GNU Free Documentation License is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, and modify a work and requires all copies and derivatives to be available under the same license. Copies may also be sold commercially, but, if produced in larger quantities, the original document or source code must be made available to the work's recipient.

Creative Commons is maintaining a content directory wiki of organizations and projects using Creative Commons licenses. On its website CC also provides case studies of projects using CC licenses across the world. CC licensed content can also be accessed through a number of content directories and search engines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Definition of Free Cultural Works</span>

The Definition of Free Cultural Works is a definition of free content from 2006. The project evaluates and recommends compatible free content licenses.

A free license or open license is a license which allows others to reuse another creator’s work as they wish. Without a special license, these uses are normally prohibited by copyright, patent or commercial license. Most free licenses are worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and perpetual. Free licenses are often the basis of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding projects.

A public license or public copyright licenses is a license by which a copyright holder as licensor can grant additional copyright permissions to any and all persons in the general public as licensees. By applying a public license to a work, provided that the licensees obey the terms and conditions of the license, copyright holders give permission for others to copy or change their work in ways that would otherwise infringe copyright law.

Software relicensing is applied in open-source software development when software licenses of software modules are incompatible and are required to be compatible for a greater combined work. Licenses applied to software as copyrightable works, in source code as binary form, can contain contradictory clauses. These requirements can make it impossible to combine source code or content of several software works to create a new combined one.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Wiley, David (2007-05-06). "About the Open Publication License". iterating toward openness. [The] Open Content License (July 14, 1998), which was replaced by the Open Publication License (June 8, 1999), were the first licenses to bring the ideals of open source software to the world of content. The OCL predates the GFDL (Nov 2002) and Creative Commons (Dec 2002) by over four years, while the improved OPL predates both by over three years. The OCL was developed primarily by me... The improved OPL was written primarily by Eric Raymond after discussions with me, Tim O’Reilly, and others... The OPL was truly innovative in that, in addition to requiring citation of the original author as source, it contained two license options which authors could choose to invoke: one restricts users’ abilities to creative derivative works, while the second restricts users’ abilities to make certain commercial uses of the material. The student of open content licensing will recognize that these are exactly the options that Creative Commons now employs. What may be forgotten is that in version 1.0 of the Creative Commons licenses, Attribution was actually included in the licenses only as an option. In version 2.0 of the CC licenses (May 24, 2004) attribution was standard on every license, and there were two licenses options: one regarding derivative works, and one regarding commercial use. So in terms of high level structure, the OPL was here about five years before CC. ... Actually, the [OCL and OPL] licenses weren’t that great, seeing as I am not a lawyer, and neither was anyone else involved in the creation of the license. The concept was right, and the execution was “good enough,” but Creative Commons (with its excellent lawyers and law school students) created a better legal instrument. As I said on the opencontent.org homepage on Monday June 30, 2003: 'My main goal in beginning OpenContent back in the Spring of 1998 was to evangelize a way of thinking about sharing materials, especially those that are useful for supporting education. ... I’m closing OpenContent because I think Creative Commons is doing a better job of providing licensing options which will stand up in court [and I'm joining] Creative Commons as Director of Educational Licenses. Now I can focus in on facilitating the kind of sharing most interesting to me ... with the pro bono support of really good IP lawyers... The OpenContent License and Open Publication License will remain online for archival purposes in their current locations. However, no future development will occur on the licenses themselves.' ... Anyone interested in a license like this is far better off using a Creative Commons license.
  2. 1 2 "Open Publication License". opencontent.org. Open Content Project. 1999-06-08. Retrieved 2018-10-18.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Various Licenses and Comments about Them - Open Publication License, Version 1.0". fsf.org. The Free Software Foundation. 2018-10-17. Retrieved 18 October 2018. This license can be used as a free documentation license. It 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. But if either of the options is invoked, the license becomes nonfree. In any case, it is incompatible with the GNU FDL... Please note that this license is not the same as the Open Content License. These two licenses are frequently confused, as the Open Content License is often referred to as the “OPL”. For clarity, it is better not to use the abbreviation “OPL” for either license. It is worth spelling their names in full to make sure people understand what you say.
  4. ↑ "Licenses by Name". Open Source Initiative . Retrieved 2018-10-19.
  5. 1 2 "OpenContent License (OPL)". opencontent.org. Open Content Project. 1998-07-14. Archived from the original on 1998-12-06. Retrieved 2018-10-18.
  6. ↑ Wiley, David (1999-01-17). "Updating the OpenContent License and Clarifying a Few Things". Open Content Project. Archived from the original on 2000-08-16.
  7. ↑ "Various Licenses and Comments about Them - Open Content License, Version 1.0". fsf.org. The Free Software Foundation. 2018-10-17. Retrieved 2018-10-18. This license does not qualify as free, because there are restrictions on charging money for copies. We recommend you do not use this license. Please note that this license is not the same as the Open Publication License. The practice of abbreviating “Open Content License” as “OPL” leads to confusion between them. For clarity, it is better not to use the abbreviation “OPL” for either license. It is worth spelling their names in full to make sure people understand what you say.
  8. ↑ Open Source and Free Documentation Licenses, Part 2: The Open Publication License, Onlamp.com, Andrew M. St. Laurent, October 7, 2004 Archived March 9, 2016, at the Wayback Machine
  9. ↑ Cathedral and Bazaar on catb.org
  10. ↑ Barr, Joe (January 13, 2003). "Meet the Perens". LinuxWorld Magazine.
  11. ↑ "Linux Gazette : FAQ : General FAQ". linuxgazette.net.
  12. ↑ Archive:Relicensing OPL to CC BY SA, Fedoraproject.org
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