Creative Commons

reative Commons is not a license, as a lot of people use to think. It is an non-profit organisation. This organisation objective is to release license with the copyleft philosophy. The copyleft philosophy is based on giving the right to copy to the user instead of reserve it to the author, editor, or anyone else.

The software mustn’t be licensed under CC license because they are written for non-technical works. They can be used for books, pictures, music, photography, and also can be used for manuals and tutorials. Legally you can use it for software, but it is not recommended. If you are looking for free license for software you can take a while reading about GPL, BSD, Apache….

CC licenses reserve or left different rights:

Attribution: This right is always reserved. This right is common for all CC license, Most countries reserve this right  to the author independently of the license. Of course all derived works must respect this attribution.

Share-Alike: All the copies and derived works must have the same license of original one.

No-Derivatives: You can copy the work always with the same license, but you cannot use is for derived works.

No-Commercial: The work and it’s derived works cannot be used for commercial purposes.

The CC license use to combine the rights. So this are all the possible CC license:

Attribution (CC-BY)
Attribution Share Alike (CC-BY-SA)
Attribution No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND)
Attribution Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC)
Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (CC-BY-NC-SA)
Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)

As I said at the CC is a organitation that create copyleft licenses. This organisation does a contribution to all the world because most of the writers, artists, musicians didn’t know about laws and licenses. So CC gave to the community legal texts to allow them to share their works without needing have law knowledge. It’s usually that if you distribute any work, by default, you have all rights reserved, so it’s very important to add the license to the works.

One important benefit of CC is the unification of copyleft licenses. This is good thing because this allow to combine different works to create a new one under the same license. Without this there could be some restrictions avoiding this type o combination.

We have to be thankful to CC organisation to allow everybody to share their works legally.

Oficial Web:

Homepage

MySql definition of free database

Every developer of free software and most of the other developers too know MySql. MySql is the most famous database system. MySql first release was in 1995 and it was developed by MySQL AB, but in 2008 MySQL AB was acquired by Sun. Sun kept the business model so it continued to be free.

MySql is a dual-license software. This mean that you can acquire it choosing one of two licenses. One is free, the GPL. So you can use it for free and you have the source code of it. The other one is a commercial one.  This second license allows you to integrate MySql in a private software and sell it. Remember that GPL don’t allow this.

Why is the most famous?

• Because it is free.
• It is multiplataform.
• There are APIs for most important languages.
• A lot of third-party software have been developed around it.
• There are a lot of documentation.

Also it is used in LAMP systems. LAMP(Linux Apache Mysql Php) is the perfect combination of free technologies for webs. All that technologies are free and they hava a total integration. There are a lot of webs applications, cms, blogs…that are perfectly integrated with LAMP.

I recommend it to everybody.  It’s important to remark that it is a relational database. Also you can use it as a non-relational database, but if you need a better performance with non-relational you must take a look to mongodb and cassandra(developed by facebook), both of them are free.

The current situation of MySql is undefined. Oracle, which develop one of the most important database systems, bought Sun in 2010. So Oracle could stop it support when they want eliminating its competitor. I thought there must be laws to avoid companies to buy their competitor….

Thanks to the license GPL there are forks that will continue the development of this software. If you want to look for it you have tree important forks: Drizzle, MariaDB and Percona Server.

License Violation

The free software is not an anarchy where we could do what we want quite the contrary, A lot of free software communities have made an effort to transform their ideology in legal texts that could be valid for most countries. This is not a formality, with this legal texts we could protect the free software, because there are people who are interested in the destruction of free software, and others that want to use it as private software.

Unfortunately the license violation is usual, but not only in free software. Every time you are using a “cracked” program you are breaking the license. In free software the license violation use to be made by the companies, which use it to take advantage breaking the license. Sometimes event they sell or copy making money.

The free software foundation have a small guide of what to do if you discover that somebody is braking a free license:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.html

If we will like to have a better free software in the future it’s important to meet the licensing and ensure other people do the same.

Remember, don’t forget to license your source code.

Legal aspect of freedom

All the free software are based not a “make what you want, you are free”.

The free software, and the free culture is based on the laws. So they need licenses to keep in that all thy publish is free. That’s not so easy  and there are a lot of license, with differences, depending of the purpose of the author.

This is a link to a pdg guide of the free license: Guide to Open Content Licenses

I recomend to everyboy interested in the license to read parts of this document, because it explain very well a lot of concepts.

Of course, the document released under a free license:

The Guide to Open Content Licenses is published under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
You are free:
* to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
* to make derivative works
Under the following conditions:
Attribution. You must give the original author credit.
Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial
purposes.
Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work,
you may distribute the resulting work only under a license
identical to this one.
*
*
For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to
others the license terms of this work.
Any of these conditions can be waived if you get
permission from the copyright holder.
Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the
above.
Full license:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/legalcode
© copyright 2004 Lawrence Liang, Piet Zwart Institute