Are permissive licenses (MIT/BSD/zlib) compatible with CC-BY?

Question

Permissive licenses like MIT only require that you include the license text if you redistribute.

CC licenses that have the BY part require that the original authors are attributed, but in flexible ways.

Is it possible to combine e.g. MIT with CC-BY, and redistribute under CC-BY? That is, with a custom attribution requirement that the MIT license must be retained.

The CC licenses have a list of attribution types here; versions 1 through 4 require "Copyright notice if supplied". Do permissive license texts constitute a "copyright notice"? If not, are there other items in that list that license texts can fall under?

Answer 1

Yes, but you still have to follow all licenses included. So that usually means you have to include all license-texts with your resulting product and attribute all authors.

To be precise: Say you have taken Part A from something with MIT-license and part B from something with CC-BY. If you combine the two, part A is still licensed MIT, part B is CC-BY and anything you added is licensed whatever you like. But the license of part A doesn't impose any restrictions on part B and vice versa, that's what permissive licenses do (in difference to copyleft-licenses).

Answer 2

If you're combining the licenses from two different projects into one project while applying the licenses to different things, yes. That is, as Mnementh says, if image A is licensed under CC BY and code B is licensed under MIT, you could redistribute both together, multi-licensed.

If you're trying to combine the licenses on one product in some strange mishmash, it gets more complicated. Technically, yes, since the only requirement of CC BY is to attribute, but you would have to add extra stipulations to ensure that both licenses are kept, which may introduce incompatibilities in one or other licenses. If this is your aim, I suggest check with a lawyer.