Today we’re beginning our discussion period for the Draft Statement of Intent for the ShareAlike Licenses. Because of the new provision in the 4.0 ShareAlike licenses allowing licensees to use SA works in Adapted Material under the conditions of a later license version, we are working on a statement of intent that publicly commits to attributes of the ShareAlike licenses that CC will keep constant in future versions. The statement is meant to address concerns about what may happen with future versions of SA, and what it means for licensors.

You can view the initial announcement to the license development list, and the announcement of the new revision and final discussion period.

Many of you are familiar with the existing statement of intent on the scope of ShareAlike, made in preparation for Wikipedia’s migration from GFDL to CC BY-SA, which we wrote about in 2008. This statement isn’t a replacement for it; instead, it will be a supplement to the commitments made there. The 10 items in the current discussion draft include a commitment to a public discussion process for all future license versions, as well as a commitment not to narrow the scope of future versions (though it could be expanded). Items 9 and 10 of the draft are proposals included for consideration, but are unlikely to appear in the final document.

We are discussing the development of this statement on the license development list before publication so that the CC community can provide its thoughtful guidance and feedback before we make this long-term commitment. (You can sign up here to join the discussion.) It will remain open for comment until February 21.

Update (February 19): After hearing community feedback, we’ve decided not to publish this now, but instead to revisit it at a later date as more general versioning principles for all of the CC licenses.