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One major problem with changing the license on a post after the fact is that it affects not just the original contribution, but also every change to that post made by others; in your proposed case,...
Answer
#2: Post edited
by
Canina
·
2020-08-25T07:20:00Z (over 4 years ago)
- One major problem with changing the license on a post after the fact is that it affects not just the original contribution, but also every *change* to that post made by others; in your proposed case, over a period of 50 years. That's potentially a lot of changes.
- This is a reason why many open-source projects, for example, are stuck with the license they originally picked; the people behind the project didn't bother to get a copyright transfer or otherwise a license from contributors that would allow them to *change* the license, so in order to change the license, they would need to *rewrite* all code where they can't get license change approval retroactively. For a large project, even *identifying* this code can be a mammoth task.
- In the scenario you describe, what happens to all the changes people contributed to that post over five decades while it was, and their changes were contributed, under CC-BY-NC-SA? What right do you (or Codidact) have to unilaterally decide to relicense *those* under a more permissive license?
- In my opinion, the current setup is fine.
It's also a lot better than in many other places, because there's a *choice* of license, and each post is clearly tagged with the license it's under. (I haven't done any analysis, but most people probably stick with the default; the important thing is that they don't *need* to use the default license.)
- One major problem with changing the license on a post after the fact is that it affects not just the original contribution, but also every *change* to that post made by others; in your proposed case, over a period of 50 years. That's potentially a lot of changes.
- This is a reason why many open-source projects, for example, are stuck with the license they originally picked; the people behind the project didn't bother to get a copyright transfer or otherwise a license from contributors that would allow them to *change* the license, so in order to change the license, they would need to *rewrite* all code where they can't get license change approval retroactively. For a large project, even *identifying* this code can be a mammoth task.
- In the scenario you describe, what happens to all the changes people contributed to that post over five decades while it was, and their changes were contributed, under CC-BY-NC-SA? What right do you (or Codidact) have to unilaterally decide to relicense *those* under a more permissive license?
- In my opinion, the current setup is fine.
- It's also a lot better than in many other places, because there's a *choice* of license, and each post is clearly tagged with the license it's under. (I haven't done any analysis, but most people probably stick with the default; the important thing is that they don't *need* to use the default license if they have a preference for another one, either generally or for that specific post.)
#1: Initial revision
by
Canina
·
2020-08-25T07:18:21Z (over 4 years ago)
One major problem with changing the license on a post after the fact is that it affects not just the original contribution, but also every *change* to that post made by others; in your proposed case, over a period of 50 years. That's potentially a lot of changes. This is a reason why many open-source projects, for example, are stuck with the license they originally picked; the people behind the project didn't bother to get a copyright transfer or otherwise a license from contributors that would allow them to *change* the license, so in order to change the license, they would need to *rewrite* all code where they can't get license change approval retroactively. For a large project, even *identifying* this code can be a mammoth task. In the scenario you describe, what happens to all the changes people contributed to that post over five decades while it was, and their changes were contributed, under CC-BY-NC-SA? What right do you (or Codidact) have to unilaterally decide to relicense *those* under a more permissive license? In my opinion, the current setup is fine. It's also a lot better than in many other places, because there's a *choice* of license, and each post is clearly tagged with the license it's under. (I haven't done any analysis, but most people probably stick with the default; the important thing is that they don't *need* to use the default license.)