License of Ubuntu Community Learning Project

The Ubuntu Community Learning Project (UCLP) has decided to license all of the work created by the project under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

The "human readable" terms of this license:

• You are free:
  • to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
  • to Remix — to adapt the work

    Under the following conditions:

    • Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

      • In the case of UCLP please use this form:

        • "<title of course> from the Ubuntu Community Learning Project, licensed under CC:BY-SA available at: <original URL of the course>"

        • Be sure to make "Ubuntu Community Learning Project" and the license active links, thanks!

    • Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.

      • At this time, the only license that qualifies is the CC:BY-SA license.

To read more about the two components which make up this license, BY and SA, see these pages on the Creative Commons wiki: Attribution and ShareAlike

Be sure to read the full license if you have any other questions: full license text

This means that you MUST either be the original author of the work or own rights to license it under a creative commons license. Otherwise the work or it's derivitives MUST already be licensed under an acceptable license before you commit work to the project.

Attribution

Each additional author or editor should be credited correctly in the appropriate files for the section, these sections should have a standard format so they can be inserted into compiled and published works.

Public Domain works are allowed without credit, but it's polite to credit and we would expect you to do so correctly.

You don't have to inform the author that you've incorperated their works into this project, but if you use substantial amounts of work in a none transformative way, then it's polite to let them know they've helped this project and point them towards links.

Free Document License

Works under the Free Document License may be compatable, but should be relicended BEFORE they're committed to the project, if your unsure, talk to the author and to the group about how to move works over. Not all works are able to be relicensed as CC-BY-SA without the explicit relicensing of the original author.

Incompatible Licenses

• Non Commercial Clause. (i.e. CC-NC)
• Non Derivitive Clause. (i.e. CC-ND)
• All Rights Reserved. (i.e. (c) )
• Any other extra terms. (i.e. postcard, binary only, etc)

If you are unsure, have any concerns or questions; be sure to ask BEFORE you commit your or someone elses work to the project.

Why we chose CC:BY-SA

There are multiple reasons why this project has chosen the CC Attribution-ShareAlike license. One of the most important reasons is that the CC:BY-SA license is a very popular license for multiple author, wiki-style, documentation websites (eg: Wikipedia). The benefit this provides the UCLP is that we are better able to integrate other great openly licensed resources into our content. This, of course, also means that others are able to better integrate our material into their openly licensed resources.

In addition to increasing the available openly license content to work with, choosing the BY-SA license also aligns well with the Free/Libre Open Source Software community ideals. The CC:BY-SA license is considered a "Free Cultural License" by the members of the FreedomDefined project (which includes one founding Ubuntu member, and current Ubuntu Community Council member, Benjamin Mako Hill). The fact that CC:BY-SA is considered a "Free Cultural License" simply shows that our license choice is consistent with the wider ideals of the community with which we work, the FLOSS community.

Why we did not choose either the NonCommercial (NC) or NoDerivatives (ND) clause

Not choosing these two clauses was a very important and telling part of our decision process. While each member of the project most likely has their own personal reasons for choosing one license over the other we, as a group, decided that excluding NC and ND was needed. Again, reasoning for this decision is better explained by the members of the FreedomDefined group. Concerning the NonCommercial clause, see the essay by Erik Möller on FreedomDefined's website here. The choice to exclude the NoDerivatives clause was much easier to make as that clause severely limits how others can use the material we create and is in stark contrast to the ethos of the community of which we are a part.