vitling / acid-banger

The Endless Acid Banger
1.18k stars 62 forks source link

CC is not recommended for software #3

Closed thecjharries closed 3 years ago

thecjharries commented 3 years ago

CC licenses are great for most mediums. Software is a different story.

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.

Depending on how careful you'd like to be (and protective of the open source nature of this tool), something like Apache 2.0 (requires only attribution; can be used in closed source) or GPL 3 (requires attribution; cannot be used in closed source) would be better for the code in the repo. Typically FOSS projects apply some sort of FOSS license to their code and a CC license to the documentation and assets.

Really enjoy the project! Thanks so much for sharing

vitling commented 3 years ago

The thing is I don't really see it is software. This is an artistic creation, not a tool or a program for "use", and I would like people to treat it as such. The whole idea of copyright gets a bit broken for projects like this, but my intention was to be able to generalise the concept of "derivative works" in this context to include music that the program creates as well as derivatives of the code. I'm a lot more excited about the idea of other creative things "citing" it than being a basis for further development - the code is pretty simple after all.

You'll see from my other work that the 3 licenses I normally use are CC, GPL3 and Apache. CC I use for things i consider to be "artworks"; GPL3 I use for things I consider to be applications or plugins, and Apache I use for things which are more like libraries. Of course there's a lot of overlap between these ideas but that's the designation I'm keeping in my head.