Greetings All,
MySQL is very pleased to announce that some of the content provided by
our external speakers and most (or perhaps all) of the content
presented by MySQL AB at the MySQL Users Conference will be placed
under one of the Creative Commons licenses
(http://creativecommons.org).
The end effect of this choice will be that anyone - attendees and
non-attendees - will have greater freedoms to use some of the
conference content for a variety of purposes. This means that sample
code presented in some sessions can be freely used to build
applications, that the slides and handouts from some sessions can be
used as the base of other presentations, articles or other media, and
that some sessions can be recorded and re-distributed. In short, others
have to recreate less work that has already been done - they can focus
more on improving and reshaping that which exists.
The exact rights granted will differ from session to session - however,
we will make sure to announce the terms before each session starts.
(The terms should also be listed in the conference program to help
avoid any misunderstandings.)
To help our attendees understand the rights that they are granted under
these licenses, I will host an open discussion about the Creative
Commons and the Creative Commons licenses. The discussion group will be
held at 10pm on the evening of the 14th. Everyone attendee is welcome
to attend and participate in this discussion.
Also, please let me highlight a few of the early embracers of these
licensing options at our conference:
Heikki Tuuri, Lead Developer of InnoDB (http://innodb.com)
----------------------------------------------------------
Heikki was the first presenter at the MySQL Users Conference to agree
to put his content under a Creative Commons license. He has kindly
chosen to allow others to use his "InnoDB: How to Take Advantage of
InnoDB's Multiple Tablespaces and Compressed Tables" session materials
under the Creative Commons Attribution License v1.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/)
Briefly stated, this means that others are free to use his session
material in the following ways:
* they can copy, distribute, display, and perform the session
materials
* they can make new works (sessions, documentation, whatever) that
are based on Heikki's session materials
The only restriction placed is that they must give Heikki credit for
his work.
Other gracious early adopters include:
* Mike Hillyer, Webmaster of VBMySQL.com, has chosen to license his
'Converting MSSQL and Access Databases to MySQL' under the ShareAlike
license v1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sa/1.0/)
* Trolltech (http://trolltech.com), makers of the Qt - the C++
application development framework that KDE is based on - has chosen to
license their 'Using Qt with MySQL' training session under the
Attribution License v1.0
* Lars Samuelsson of Lentus AB (http://www.lentus.se/) has chosen to
license his 'Large Volume Data Transformation and Warehousing using
MySQL' under the Attribution License v1.0
Each of these speakers have also agreed to allow recordings to be made
of their sessions. After reviewing any recordings that are intended for
public distribution, they *may* also choose to place the recordings
under a Creative Commons license.
Please join me in thanking these speakers for their willingness to
participate in and help build a more cooperative model of intellectual
property!
Personally, I plan to thank them by spending a few minutes writing
about the nice choice that each of them has made in my blog at
http://zak.greant.com/. I urge you to do the same! (If you do, please
let me know.)
Cheers!
--
Zak Greant
MySQL AB Community Advocate
