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Suppose I am finishing an open source software. I am about to publish it but I just have to choose the license. I want it to be a CC-BY license but I don't want anyone to republish it under ANY other license.

My question:

How do I stop future users from just publishing it under any other license?

I've also just found out about the "ShareAlike" attribute. Would this do what I want?

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    do you mean/want copyleft?
    – Pandya
    Jul 1, 2015 at 15:49
  • i dont know that is why im asking you Jul 1, 2015 at 15:49
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    Share-alike is a copyright licensing term, originally used by the Creative Commons project, to describe works or licences that require copies or adaptations of the work to be released under the same or similar licence as the original. Copyleft licences are free content or free software licences with a share-alike condition.
    – Pandya
    Jul 1, 2015 at 15:54

3 Answers 3

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If you want it to be a CC-BY (as asked in question) and don't want anyone to republish it under any other license, then you can use Share-alike attribute.

From wikipedia:-

Share-alike is a copyright licensing term, originally used by the Creative Commons project, to describe works or licences that require copies or adaptations of the work to be released under the same or similar licence as the original

Also visit: CC BY-SA 4.0 which clearly following terms:-

ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

Also visit SA, aka Share Alike:-

The Share Alike aspect requires all derivatives of a work to be licensed under the same (or a compatible) license as the original. Thus, if a person were to use parts of a BY-SA movie to create a new short film that new short film would also need to be licensed as BY-SA. The advantage of this license is that future users are not able to add new restrictions to a derivative of your work; their derivatives must be licensed the same way.

emphasis mine


Also visit these articles on copyleft.

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When redistribution of a derivative work is permitted only under the same, or a compatible license, that is called CopyLeft or, in the context of Creative Commons ShareAlike.

Under such licenses, it is only allowed to redistributed a derivative work if the license under which it is redistributed meets all criteria of the original license.

You can "tag on" Share-Alike to most of the Creative Commons licenses. In the case of CC-BY, this would become CC-BY-SA.

Note that for some Creative Commons licenses this makes no sense. ND (no derivatives) can't also be SA, because you're not allowed to distribute a modified version at all. CC-0 doesn't place any restrictions, so it doesn't make sense to restrict is with SA.

The oldest example of this kind of license is the GPL, a copyleft license. It has the restriction that derivative works must be published under the GPL, or a compatible license.

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You're looking for a ShareAlike clause.

ShareAlike licenses force the derived work to redistribute under the same license, or one which is similar or compatible. However, without other clauses, these licenses won't stop others from producing and distributing derived/different versions of your work.

The license that you currently have is the Creative Commons Attribution license or CC-BY. The same license with the ShareAlike clause would be the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, or CC-BY-SA.

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