Why does the Open Clip Art Library require artwork be covered as Public Domain? What about GPL/LGPL/other?
Many of us are familiar with the Gnu General Public License (GPL, LGPL) and other open source licenses through our software development work, so it’s logical to wonder if those licenses would be similarly helpful in promoting open clip art. Those licenses are valuable for software because usually when someone modifies your software, the result is more valuable than the original, so you want to ensure it is given back for others to modify and use. However, with clip art the situation is different. Clip art is intended to be used in larger compositions, presentations, books, and so forth, and it really doesn’t matter to us if those are open source or not; indeed, in many cases such things cannot be open source due to other issues (such as containing sensitive data). In other words, the result is not as valuable to us as the original. There are some licenses that don’t require this Copylefting behavior. Typically these require the user to do something, such as provide attribution.
