Creative Commons plaintext licenses and using CC0 for software

Creative Commons posted two pieces to their blog today regarding their licenses, and in particular, CC0, the Creative Commons public domain notice.

Plaintext versions of Creative Commons licenses

The Creative Commons licenses are now available in plaintext form:

• CC BY 3.0 legalcode.txt
• CC BY-SA 3.0 legalcode.txt
• CC BY-ND 3.0 legalcode.txt
• CC BY-NC 3.0 legalcode.txt
• CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 legalcode.txt
• CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 legalcode.txt
• CC0 1.0 legalcode.txt

CC notes that although the XHTML licenses are the official versions, the plaintext versions may be useful to include for certain cases, such as the non-software content in a FOSS project. The blog post goes on to explain how to provide licensing information and examples of annotation.

CC licenses are not for software--except CC0

Today's second post began with a reminder, reiterated in the post about plaintext licenses, that CC licenses are not meant for software.

However, many people have inquired in particular about using CC0 for releasing software to the public domain. As a result, CC worked with the Free Software Foundation, which has now added CC0 to its free software licenses list. Read more about this announcement and how to use CC0 for softrware.