On 18/04/18 18:15, Les Kitchen wrote:
Just quoting from the FSF's recommendations at It is not worth the trouble to use copyleft for most small programs. We use 300 lines as our benchmark: when a software package's source code is shorter than that, the benefits provided by copyleft are usually too small to justify the inconvenience of making sure a copy of the license always accompanies the software.
I see what you mean then. It depends on how you were planning to distribute the code. To me the recommendations make the assumption that you are distributing your code as a collection of files (in which case, having a 200+ line copyright file for a tiny program might be less than pragmatic). Publishing code as part of a webpage or blog can be a bit different. For example, I notice that the FSF recommendations for the licence statement in Javascript files don't make use of the formula "You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program", and instead suggest various ways of linking to the licence. Any way you do it, the two significant parts are (a) to have a copyright notice so it is clear who the copyright holder is, and (b) for it to be clear which specific licence the code is under (and where it can be found).
Yeah, CC BY-SA was what I had in mind for content (just couldn't remember the formula). But there has been some later traffic about CC0...
In my view the difference between these two free CC licences is philosophical, analogous to the difference between eg the Apache licence and the GPL licence. One issue is whether you care (as the creator) whether someone was to say modify your work and place it under a proprietary licence to the people they in turn distribute it to. And if you do care, whether you are willing to make use of a legal hack such as CC BY-SA to ensure that users further down the chain are not restricted in this way. Another issue to consider is attribution. In academia this is often handled in non-legal ways, because there is a strong community onus on crediting the source of material, and plagiarizing is penalized. Under the Australian copyright amendments in 2000 such rights were codified. But not all copyright codes legally require attribution of the source, and so many licences are explicit about this. CC0 relinquishes such legal rights (at least as far as it can). regards, Glenn -- pgp: 833A 67F6 1966 EF5F 7AF1 DFF6 75B7 5621 6D65 6D65