As usual, please feel free to forward any of my words to CC. I'm very busy
and probably won't manage to do so myself.
Evan Prodromou wrote:
So, I have big news and a big question.
Big news
Creative Commons has announced the public draft of the next version of
their license suite:
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/6017
Reviewing the license, everything we were originally worried about appears
to have been fixed (with the possible exception of the DRM business), and
no new problems seem to have been introduced. It all looks DFSG-free to
me, with the exception of keep intact, noted below.
The credits rule was restricted all the way down to the point where it only
applies to a list of all contributors, which renders it very innocuous --
this goes further than we asked for.
The keep intact phraseology is still present, and still mildly
troublesome:
You must keep intact all notices that refer to this License and
to the disclaimer of warranties.
*ALL* notices that refer to the License? Heck, I could make up my own
extremely offensive notice which referred to the license -- not a copyright
notice, but some sort of bizarre rant, talking about how I hate the license
and giving a bogus interpretation of it. (People have attached weirder
stuff to GPL-licensed works.) People should use phrasing like that in the
Apache 2.0 license when drafting clauses like this:
You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works
that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and
attribution notices from the Source form of the Work,
excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of
the Derivative Works; and
However, I think the bad CC notice clause doesn't make most works under the
license non-free: it only renders non-free works where someone *actually*
includes such an obnoxious, inappropriate notice, and claims that it's
covered by the notice clause. This sort of notice is clearly not CC's
intent for the notice clause.
If it were restricted to legal notices, which I believe is what it's
supposed to refer to, that would probably eliminate my concerns about this
completely.
I hate to bring this up at the last minute, but it would be a definite
improvement to replace notices with legal notices in this clause, or to
do something similar to clarify it.
The changes from the 2.x version are largely due to an effort to make
the licenses compatible with the DFSG. Over the last year, the Debian
Creative Commons Workgroup has worked with Creative Commons to smooth
out the rough edges of license. DDs have already seen it, but there's a
report here on the work:
http://evan.prodromou.name/Debian_Creative_Commons_Workgroup_report
Congrats folks!
Big question
The main question I want to ask debian-legal is this:
Does the anti-DRM requirement in the CCPL 3.0 draft, without a
parallel distribution proviso, make it incompatible with the
DFSG?
Commented in another post if it really prohibited parallel
distribution, I would think it's non-free -- but I think it does *not*
prohibit parallel distribution. So I think it *is* free.
--
Nathanael Nerode [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Bush admitted to violating FISA and said he was proud of it.
So why isn't he in prison yet?...
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