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Activities · Activity 11.4

Q.Explore the follouing websites to know about open/public licensing:

(i) creativecommons.org for cc, and
(ii) gnu.org for GNU GPL
Sikkim CbseNCERTSubjective· 2mImportance★★★★★
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Creative Commons (creativecommons.org) provides ready-made public licences for creative content built from four conditions (BY, SA, NC, ND), while GNU GPL (gnu.org) is a copyleft licence for software guaranteeing users the freedom to run, study, modify and share it — with modified versions staying equally free.

Open/public licensing lets a creator keep copyright while granting everyone certain reuse rights in advance — no individual permission needed. The two most important families are exactly the ones this activity points to. Here is a model summary of what you find on each site:

(i) creativecommons.org — Creative Commons (CC) licences

  • Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that publishes free, standardised copyright licences for creative works: photos, music, articles, videos, courseware (NCERT textbooks themselves are CC-licensed!).
  • A creator chooses a licence by combining four conditions:
    • BY (Attribution): reusers must credit the creator — present in every CC licence.
    • SA (ShareAlike): adaptations must be shared under the same licence.
    • NC (NonCommercial): no commercial use allowed.
    • ND (NoDerivatives): the work may be shared but not modified.
  • These combine into six licences, from most open to most restrictive: CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-ND. There is also CC0, by which the creator dedicates the work to the public domain (no rights reserved).
  • The site provides a licence chooser, human-readable "deeds" and the legal text, plus search for CC-licensed media.

(ii) gnu.org — GNU General Public License (GPL)

  • gnu.org is the site of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation; it hosts the text and FAQs of the GNU GPL, the most widely used free-software licence (Linux kernel, GIMP, etc.).
  • "Free" means freedom, not price — the four freedoms: run the program for any purpose, study its source code, modify it, and redistribute copies (original or modified). …

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