Why should I care about Creative Commons licenses?

For Fate, we’re going to use the Creative Commons Attribution license as one of our open licensing options. This is one of six Creative Commons licenses, and it’s the most liberal one of them all. It provides the maximum freedom to people who want to write a game or supplement based on Fate Core. We think we’ll see more Fate material as a result. Everyone wins!

The Creative Commons Attribution license isn’t viral. If you create something new based on our Creative Commons release of Fate Core, you won’t have to share your creation for others to adapt. That means that third party Fate creators have the freedom to make their own decisions about how their creative work can be reused. We hope people will share! But we understand that there are good reasons why someone might choose not to share, and we respect that.

Also, the Creative Commons Attribution license is compatible with some material that can’t be used with the OGL. For example, Cory Doctorow’s excellent novel Little Brother was released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. That means it can’t be mixed with an OGL game to produce something new. The Eclipse Phase RPG uses the same license, so it’s also incompatible with the OGL. There’s more and more creative work released under Creative Commons licenses every day, and we’d like Fate Core to play nicely with all of it.

Finally, Creative Commons licenses are designed to support most of the world’s legal systems. This makes them an important option for our friends outside the United States.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Creative Commons licenses, there’s a great guide here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/