Choosing appropriate licence for documentation

Creative Commons -licence

Creative Commons is an international, multi-stakeholder nonprofit organization. It is diversely-funded by individuals, foundations, corporations, governments, and other institutions and agencies. Creative Commons aimes at helping people to legally share their "knowledge and creativity to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world", using the full potential of the internet for society development, growth and productivity. Their work spans a variety of different areas and partners working to create a more vibrant commons, such as arts and culture, open access, education and OER, open data, legal, open science and technology. For this, Creative Commons provides free, easy-to-use copyright licenses to make a simple and standardized way to retain copyright while giving the public permission to copy, distribute, edit, remix, and build upon one's creative work–on conditions of the creator's choice, all within the boundaries of copyright law.

Every Creative Commons license ensures licensors get the credit for their work they deserve. What is the different when compared to for example patents, which are national and having limited duration property right relating to an invention, every Creative Commons license works around the world and lasts as long as applicable copyright lasts (because they are built on copyright). These common features serve as the baseline, and on top of which creators can choose to grant additional permissions when they decide how they want their work to be used.

ShareAlike - What does it mean in the context of Creative Commons?

If a creator decides to allow derivative works, she may also choose to require that anyone who uses the work to make that new work available under the same license terms. This idea is called “ShareAlike” standing for helping the digital commons grow over time. ShareAlike is inspired by the GNU General Public License, used by many free and open source software projects. Licensees must credit the creator, keep copyright notices intact on all copies of the work, and link to the license from copies of the work.

How to choose appropriate Creative Commons license?

So, when considering which license to apply to my work, I need to ask myself what types of reuse I would like to encourage, and license accordingly. When choosing a license type, I should answer in two questions.

When considering for example this documentation website, in the beginning of Fab Academy, I made following decisions regarding licence features:

• Do I want to allow derivative works or not? // Yes, No, Yes, as long as others share alike
• Do I want to allow commercial use or not? // Yes, No

This returned me a license, regarding which This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This will be the one that I will use also fo my Final Project.

The licence means, that anyone is allowed to:

• Share // copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
• Adapt // remix, transform, and build upon the material

Under these terms of Licence Conditions:

• Attribution // a reuser must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.
• NonCommercial // a reuser may not use the material for commercial purposes.
• ShareAlike // if a reuser remix, transform, or build upon the material, she must distribute my contributions under the same license as the original.
• No additional restrictions // a reuser may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Figure: Creative commons license spectrum by Shaddim; original CC license symbols by Creative Commons [CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Alternative Licenses:

Summary about my decision

Where most of the licences seem to be for licensing software, such as the MIT License, the Creative Commons is for any creatice work, such as art work and designs. I decided to license all the content of this documentation website utilizing the Creative Commons license of the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, appreciating the condition, that people acknowledge the creators. I am glad to distrubute my project and if someone finds it inspiring to utilize, respecting the work I have done and mentioning me in their project.

What will be the licence for final project`?

Licence for Artificial Intelligence programming Environment (Alvin Ai platform)

My final project is done in the context of Alvin Artificial Intelligence development. It does consist of the following main components: Alvin AI Assistant Android application with preinstalled Alvin Artificial Intelligence and integrated EnglishScript programming language.

The programming environment allows programming in English by having a conversation with Alvin AI (by speaking or texting with it).

The programming environment is developed further to let students to attach also audio recordings to the images to tell e.g. how the shown things sound like. Later Alvin will use these clues to gradually learn how things look and sound like in general and will be able to recognize specific things also from new images or video stream.

Now core group of Alvin AI co-working team are developing affordable robot arm for school contexts. My final project is related to that development so, that I will use some main components and principles in my project. I will design and build AI controlled car robot, instead of robot arm.

Because of this context, I have to follow same licensing principles than rest of the Alvin AI project.

The AI programming environment is free for non-commercial use. For educational institutions there is a small fee / student / year.

With the grant Alvin Artificial Intelligence is further developed and then distributed under an OpenSource license (GitHub - EnglishScript). In practise, it is licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1

Affordable Robot control by using ESP32: Drawings are shared vith opensource license

The school tablet or student's mobile phone is connected to the ESP32 via BT or Wifi. Students program Alvin Artificial Intelligence to respond to measurements sent by a robot or IoT device. For example, Alvin can say or display something and control the robot based on student’s programming.

So, this co-working project in general will develop electronics board for ESP32 and drawings and software in general will be distributed under the under opensource license (not confirmed yet, what)

affordable implementation for the actuators of the robot

The aim of the co-working project is to implement the robot's structure, motors, cylinders and valves with the simplest possible structure and inexpensive and ecological materials. Ultimate aim is to share instructions to students that they can use and remix instructions in different STEAM lessons. Appropriate opensource licensing model is not confirmed yet (or I doen't know)

What is appropriate Licensing for my fork of this robot control

I will follow that Alvin Ai Robot project and choose same licensing model.

Draft slide of the final project