Is it possible to distribute binary files using any open source or Creative Commons license? In particular, I have several Flash videos (.swf files) whose sources (.fla files) are not available/lost. These videos need to be shipped with an open source project. I am looking for possible ways to address this situation. An option would be to recreate them using Flash or JavaScript, but that would be very costly in terms of effort, and therefore, does not seem feasible. I saw that BSD license has something related to object code, but not sure if that is applicable here.
Distribute SWF (binary) files with open source license?
licensing;creative commons;binaries
Yes you can; you are the copyright holder so you can apply whatever license you want.However, I recommend that you avoid the licenses designed for source code (such as GPL, BSD and so on) and choose a more general-purpose license. The Creative Commons licenses are an excellent choice; they have been used for books, photographs, music, movies and many more things. Flash videos are surely no problem.The problem with source code licenses is that they can cause confusion, and worse, some like the GPL may not even work since they require access to the source code for binary distributions.Since you want to integrate these files with an existing open source project, it's important to make sure that the licenses will be compatible. Fortunately most licenses do not consider binary files (like videos, images) as critical parts of the software, so most licensing choices should be safe. For example, people have licensed projects composed of GPL source code + proprietary assets.