Zoe under a Creative Commons License!?

Zoe is the first piece of software I've seen released under a Creative Commons license. It's under the Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Ugh. This is not good. A number of people have criticized the CC licenses because "We don't need any more open source licenses!" but the Creative Commons licenses were never intended to be used for software:

We want to complement, rather than compete with, these existing efforts to ease online sharing and collaboration. Right now we don't plan to get involved in software licensing at all. Instead, we'll concentrate on scholarship, film, literature, music, photography, and other kinds of creative works.

Now some software developers are making the complaint true.

I think there are three types of open source licenses you should use:

  1. GPL/LGPL -- when you want to ensure your software always remains Free
  2. Apache -- when you want credit
  3. BSD/MIT -- when you don't care what people use your software for

Using other licenses or creating your own -- in most cases -- just creates confusion and prevents other people from utilizing your code.