towards a usable CC-BY-4.0 parts library

[Johannes Schauer]

It seems to me like you've mentioned the obvious and easiest solution already. Heck, even I could whip up a 1x3 plate or a rectangle primitive and grant it the 4.0 license and re-submit it as a totally new part.

I've done exactly that and created a small Python script that is able to generate dat files for a few important plates, bricks and slopes:

A trivial one-liner that only references other files would not need to look different; there really isn't any creative content there that would be in danger of being plagiarized. Same with a geometrically defined part like a rect primitive: mathematically the content can only be one thing as defined by the spec. There's no intellectual property to protect (or if there is, it's in the defining specification, not the file itself).

That was my intuition as well, but I'm not a lawyer so I'm unable to say for sure. 

The next update will make this percentage even smaller and, hopefully, put most of the commonly used bricks and primitives into 4.0. Let's table this discussion until then.

Agreed. I'll repeat my analysis again in June.

Thank you for all your work!!