[od-discuss] Questions about attribution requirements in OS and English Heritage data

Tue Jul 23 18:53:17 UTC 2013

On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 1:21 AM, Kent Mewhort <kent at openissues.ca> wrote:
> Sure, let me try to clarify.  If an author places a work under an open
> licence, this is effectively a licence "to the world".  The author grants
> the rights to anyone who receives the work.  If someone else redistributes
> that work, the downstream recipients are still receiving their licence from
> the original author, not the redistributor.  The original licence applies to
> everyone and there is no need to "sublicence".
>
> In fact, a lot of open licences such as Creative Commons explicitly prohibit
> sublicensing.  This is to make it clear that you're not allowed to
> redistibute the work under a different licence.  You can't add any terms to,
> nor remove any terms from, the original licence.  Of course, if you make
> modifications, you can attach additional terms onto your own modifications
> (unless a copyleft clause requires you to place these under the same
> licence).  Copyleft or not though, the original work is still under the
> original licence.

I've always thought this was a pointless restriction in the absence of copyleft.

> Even when licences don't explicitly prohibit sublicensing, it's usually
> implicit.  I'm not aware of any common open licences that allow
> sublicencing.

http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
http://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0

Mike