Hey everyone,
I wanted to create a post in response to Charles Dietrich’s comment on the previous post, and I am taking that comment and conversation here so that we can have a more focused discussion on this issue. His comment was:
Since you brought up the license issue, I’d love it if the user could specify the license they want to use, including ‘All rights reserved’, ‘BSD’, and ‘GPL’ for code (which pretty much covers the bases, since none of these things are libraries) and the licenses that Flickr lets you choose among for content (or a subset including ‘All rights reserved’ and ‘creative commons sharealike’, since it’s a big list):
None (All rights reserved)
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
Attribution Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons
Attribution-NoDerivs Creative CommonsI guess the big change that I’m asking for is the right to say ‘All rights reserved’.
Thanks for your response on this. Actually, I have been thinking about the ‘all rights reserved’ option for a while, and sincerely, couldn’t find a definite conclusion on what to do.
As you mentioned, Flickr (the website I am taking a lot of inspiration on handling of shared creativity) provides those options, and it wouldn’t be hard to do it on OpenProcessing. And providing people options to select their preferred license really make sense. However, couple of things making my feet itch:
- -> An All-rights-reserved (ARR) sketch doesn’t really make sense if it is provided with its source code option, so I think, a user who wants to ARR his/her sketch wouldn’t prefer to display the source code either. This makes sense, and I totally understand it. But as a result, I can imagine OpenProcessing becoming a deposit for interesting Java Applets, but much value being lost… From the comments, I observe that sketches really become valuable along their source code; an example comment I like seeing is “Very nice sketch with very short code!”. What makes a Processing sketch different from a flash animation is its source code approach. And I am trying to keep OpenProcessing a place to make that difference obvious, get prospective processing users interested and encourage them to learn by going through the code.
- -> Without source code being shared, I believe the website wouldn’t be any different from a Flash exhibition website, from the point of someone who doesn’t know about processing…
- -> Also, I believe this community had ever been better since Ben Fry and Casey Reas (and many supporters like Daniel Shiffman) had strictly tried to keep things open source and CC. You know, the Processing application is also under Creative Commons. They don’t restrict people to share their sketches under CC, which of course gives us a lot freedom. But at this point, if OpenProcessing allows for ARR sketches, I would feel that my efforts on this project wouldn’t return that much value other than providing a service for people to exhibit their sketches without any intention to improve the community.
Let me know what you guys think. This is definitely debatable, and can be tried; I can try to provide such a feature for testing purposes, to see how it goes. But, my worries are in the paragraph above. So let me know what you think.
Having done a bit of academic research into Open Source, some directly related to processing, here is my take on this issue. A project like Processing has grown and succeeded because each of us who decides to learn the language is able to stand on the shoulders of those who came before, whether it be source code from the forums, flickr, this site etc.
It is in the spirit of the entire Processing project to share code and keep it open source. I know I am a better programmer precisely because I have been able to peak under the hood of other’s work. ARR seems to go against the project entirely, imho.
I think that there is also a point of view that sees open source as ‘no license whatsoever’, instead it is very simple to maintain credit and require that credit be given along the way if you use a GPL or CC.
Just to throw a big spanner into the conversation, it would seem to me that it is likely that none of the sketches (or very few) on openprocessing.org now satisfy the criteria for the GNU GPL.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/
You must conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy distributed an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty and keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of the GNU General Public License along with the Program. Any translation of the GNU General Public License must be accompanied by the GNU General Public License.
This suggests to me that copyright notices and warranty disclaimers must be present in the original source file(s).
You should seek advice from someone properly versed in the usage of the GPL and other licences.
I think you should not add that option. People can just add the license note to the top of their source code. That is a much more flexible solution allowing for the license notice to travel with the files (in the .zip) and reduces the options when uploading/ editing contributions. (Btw view-sketch-page should say: … is licensed under … if not otherwise stated in the source code.)
And i share the opinion that the sketches should be as open as possible for everyone to learn and fork.
Hey everyone,
thanks a lot for your comments. I am really appreciating your feedback on this issue.
To Subpixel: As you mention, there is a lot of confusion if processing sketches can be protected under GPL. Initially that was the sole license applied in OpenProcessing. But it wasn’t necessarily licensing the visual itself, so I added CC Sharealike to the sketches. However, I am also confused if having “GPL” license and the name of the author on the same page would be enough for GPL. As you mentioned, it might be necessary to keep both on the source code. If this is a necessity for this license to work, I guess I can add them automatically on top of every source code. But I am not even sure how GPL works legally anyways (never heard of any lawsuits, that the judgement made upon the specifications of GPL or CC). I had been looking for ‘someone properly versed’ for the usage of these, but I wasn’t successful. It is still a very new concept for lawyers I guess. If you guys know anyone, I would appreciate any referral.
to Florian: I have the “All the visuals exhibited are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0. All the source code provided is licensed under Creative Commons GNU General Public License.” text in the footer on every page. You think it wouldn’t be enough?
to All: As you had been expressing too, I am also in the favor of keeping the website all-open-source, and not allowing ARR sketches yet. But I will definitely be following the user feedback and the legal proceedings on this.
Thanks for commenting on this issue. I agree that it doesn’t make much sense to specify source code as ARR and then display the source code.
Patrick and Sinan are expressing the view that OpenProcessing should remain open-source as it is now, but Florian is suggesting something different. If I am reading correctly, he supports defaulting to the current licenses and allowing the user to have their own licensing in the source code that overrides the current licenses.
—
I hope that people will release source / work as GPL / CC-Attribution-ShareAlike, or at least another FOSS license, and the current arrangement encourages this. The big question is whether there are many users who are quite sure that they want to keep their source or works ARR, but would like to use a processing sharing site and are willing to expend the effort to upload their code. (The little question is whether some would prefer to release code under BSD-type arrangements, in order to give more flexibility to remixers.)
I think this should be opened up to the larger Processing community, so as to include people who are currently not using OpenProcessing (or seeing this blog). So I have posted to the Discourse.
http://processing.org/discourse/yabb_beta/YaBB.cgi?board=Collaboration;action=display;num=1237087472
Thanks for all the info. I will check into it a little more, and will surely follow the responses in the processing discourse. From this point, I can see that there would be value to provide options to select among CC/GPL licenses. That would, I guess, provide more flexibility to everyone as of their sketches. I will keep you all updated!
‘All Rights Reserved’ sketches in OpenProcessing? Please nooooooooo!
Sketches without code should be upload at ‘CloseProcessing.com’
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike sound so natural for this place!
I’ve not been contributing (yet) to this place, but am regularly following your progress and just want to say I’d also try to avoid ARR pieces at all costs. Once allowed *some* people will start using it for whatever (non)reasons and others will notice and wonder if they shouldn’t switch to ARR too. For the type of content shown here All rights reserved are not just childish, but as you pointed out yourself, is a real danger for the collection & community here…
However, there’s one other thing I need to point out to you (and for which I still need a final clarification myself):
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOutput
Quote: “…copyright law does not give you any say in the use of the output people make from their data using your program. If the user uses your program to enter or convert his own data, the copyright on the output belongs to him, not you. More generally, when a program translates its input into some other form, the copyright status of the output inherits that of the input it was generated from. So the only way you have a say in the use of the output is if substantial parts of the output are copied (more or less) from text in your program.”
And here’s also some more interesting info/opinion in regards to Google Code and them not allowing CC-NC & CC-ND licenses:
http://groups.google.com/group/google-code-hosting/msg/edc7ef2a6bf22867
I think these are all very interesting points and just wanted to share these findings/thoughts with you…
I would just like to not-add to the discussion by stating that OpenProcessing with selectively closed source code does not really make sense.
If you post something on here with closed source code, you’re just trying to exhibit (show off) your work, and you can do that on your own site.
Keep it free and open. Nobody has to submit (and I don’t submit what I do not want to be shared.) anyway, if he/she doesn’t want. The big, big PLUS of openprocessing is that it is open. I think most people working in processing read those pages and get inspired by the code of others. Without this, growth wouldn’t be so huge.
If anything can be improved on openprocessing, then it is a kind of improved quality/tag sorting. As with all growing projects, it becomes harder and harder to keep an overview. This, however, is a different issue.
Hey Bejoscha, upon the feedback we got, this is currently how we are proceeding, and willing to continue doing the same to keep the open nature of OpenProcessing. So no worries on that!
Thanks for your feedback on quality and tagging. This is something I am aware of; it is getting harder to pick out interesting sketches among all those sketches being uploaded (including beginner level sketches uploaded in classrooms). It is my responsibility to provide a better interface answering this issue, and I am currently working on it: Basically converting homepage to be more of a dashboard for registered users, where the sketches that might be to their interest will be available. Me working on it!