On Sat, 2007-08-04 at 19:17 +0200, Sam Hocevar wrote: > http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/CopyrightFormat > > I therefore would like your opinions about this proposal, its > shortcomings, and a strategy to implement it quickly and as widely as > possible.
This is great! One possible shortcoming might be the lack of information provided for less widely used licenses (anything requiring an 'other' value in the License field). How much Debian should be concerned about such licenses is no doubt up to debate, but especially in non-free there are likely many such cases. One possible solution that I have in mind would be to add information about the terms of the license in a machine-readable way. Perhaps something along the lines of what Creative Commons has done with mod_cc[1], but with several additions that suit Debian's (and Debian's users) requirements. I am imagining another field something like License-Terms: Requires-Attribution, Noncommercial, Choice-of-Venue, SSL-Exception, GPL-Compatible Clearly the exact terms and their meaning would require a bit of discussion, but should ideally include tags which would be as unambiguous as possible and would cover as many of the properties of licenses as we can that are important to Debian end-users, without making the License-Terms field longer than the license itself... Of course, this idea does have several limitations: * It is not particularly useful for well known licenses. Perhaps for any license besides "other", these values could be inferred? * There will be both mistakes and misinterpretations of these terms, regardless of how well defined they can be made in proposals. Mistakes happen. Does this pose a legal problem for Debian if individuals act based on the tags and are later held liable for license violations? * There will no doubt be different interpretations of whether or not a license deserves a particular tag (as there are now about whether or not a license meets the DFSG). Who will be ultimately responsible for the tags, and is that influenced by the previous point about potential liability? * This is not a replacement for people actually reading the licenses of the software they are installing. The tags can not cover every possible facet of a software license and any license-conscious end-user (individual or corporate) will still need to read the licenses of their software to make sure they are in compliance with its terms. That said, I hope that this does provide meaningful benefit. The primary benefit that I envision is to eventually allow users to select which license terms they find acceptable and which they do not and to limit their package installations on that basis. As mentioned above, this is not a complete solution, since the licenses must still be read in full, but it would cut down on the amount of packages which require consideration. For example, corporate users may select a policy which would not consider packages tagged Noncommercial, allowing their license review teams to only look at packages which may be usable by their company. It could also allow users with their own particular definitions of freeness to easily select packages that fit their desires. Thoughts, comments, and criticisms welcome. Cheers, Kevin 1. http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/cc/ P.S. By making this suggestion, I am volunteering to help with the huge amount of work that it requires. ;) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]