Creative Commons Conundrum

There’s a rather odd trend of using Creative Commons (CC) licenses for “open source” software. Despite the fact that Creative Commons recommends against this I’ve noticed this happening more and more.

So what’s the problem? For starters, none of the CC licenses are considered open source, so they can’t really claim that term. A more specific problem is that none of the CC licenses are GPL compatible. The end of the world? Certainly not, but if you go down this route don’t expect GPL licensed projects to include your CC licensed code.

The CC and GPL story gets even stranger. Some how the CC folks have co-opted the GPL license, to the point where many people now call in the Creative Commons GPL and link to the CC site to reference the license. Perhaps the CC folks do a better job of marketing the GPL license than GNU does?

Related posts:

1. PHP Helpers: html_print_r
2. MakeItLink
3. Efficient PHP: Don’t Abuse dirname( __FILE__ )
4. MakeItLink – Detecting URLs In Text And Making Them Links
5. WordPress Theme Authors, Don’t Forget The wp_head() Function