Version 3.0 of the main Creative Commons licenses were released 2007-02-23, that is 5 years and 2 days ago, remaining current much longer than previous versions* (1.0: 17 months, 2.0: 12 months; 2.5: 20 months). Hopefully the eventual version 4.0 licenses will remain current much longer still.
Probably the most important developments that 3.0 contributed to were the adoption of CC-BY-SA as the primary license used by Wikimedia projects and the use of various CC licenses (most often CC-BY) by governments and other policy-making entities. 3.0 was probably not absolutely necessary and certainly only a small part of these developments, but it surely helped, e.g., by addressing some of the Debian community’s concerns (which overlap with the views of many Wikimedians) and through further internationalization.
Congratulations to everyone who worked on 3.0 5-6 years ago, especially CC’s General Counsel at the time, Mia Garlick, CC affiliates, and especially (and with some overlap) people who participated in public discussions!
* A further bit of trivia: depending on how one ‘counts’ (eg, not if one counts each edit on Wikipedias!), version 2.0 licenses probably remains the most used, as those are baked into Flickr. During 4.0’s long tenure, I very much hope to see new tools and forms which make it the most used CC license version, even if Flickr does not change at all and continues to grow.
Happy 5th Birthday Version 3.0!! Never did I think they would last so long, Mia
Happy 5th birthday!
Though I could not use most of the cc by-sa content (GPL vs. cc incompatibility), it has been a great driver of free culture – one of the greatest we have.
And I think I can hardly offer a bigger praise than that.
Hi Mia!
Thanks Arne, that is high praise. I’d love for some progress on compatibility to be made in 4.0, as you know; anyone else, http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0/ShareAlike#Compatibility_with_other_copyleft_licenses has some info and I blogged about a possible mechanism http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2011/12/06/mozilla-public-license-2-0-and-increasing-public-copyright-license-compatibility/
Sadly I did not manage to put my use cases for compatibility in the wiki (free time ran short – and I lost my emails since december 2011 :( ).
There is still plenty of time. :)
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