Evan Prodromou <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > [...] http://evan.prodromou.name/CC_Licence_Distinctions
I think some of that is shooting at shadows, some is hyperbole and some is contentious: for example, the "minor techincal issues" with the CC licences *have* been exploited by licensors to render works under those licences break the DFSG. I hope that most of those exploits were unintentional and will be lost in the "wash" of CC 3.0's release, but I doubt all were. The biggest problem with the CC so-called-generic licences are the extreme verbosity and complexity of them because they are written for US law. A true generic licence would be in plain and simple language, much nearer the Scotland iCommons licences than the current generic. Anyway, to your questions: > My question is: at what point would it be acceptable for a third-party > organization to state that a license is "DFSG-compatible"? At what point At the point when a work under solely that licence is accepted into the distribution (the main archive) and it's not a bug. > would it be acceptable to use the Debian trademarks (name and/or open > use logo) to underline that fact? At the point a licence is available permitting it. Routes for approving that would seem to be: 1. by GR 2. by DPL requesting SPI to issue such a licence 3. by the forthcoming(?) spi-trademark licence permitting it Isn't it confusing to use the trademark for licences rather than software itself? After all, a licence being "DFSG-compatible" doesn't mean something will go into debian, just that it might be possible, if the licensor doesn't stop it somehow else. I'd prefer to promote "this is in debian" and "this could go well with debian" marks for software itself, more than licences. After all, most of us see licensing as a necessary evil at best. Is it possible to decide a marking set which could do both? > But I think there's some value for people deciding on a license in > knowing which licenses clearly prevent a work from being included in > Debian and which do not. One possible list (requires updating/correcting) is at http://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/ > So: if there's a public statement by Debian or > debian-legal on a license (like http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary > is now), would it be misleading for an organization to point to that > statement? Especially if it was clear that the review and approval was > not an endorsement of the organization or their goals? No, it wouldn't be misleading. However, "debian-legal is advisory. The actual decision-makers are the ftpmasters and the package maintainers. However, if one cannot convince most of the generally liberal debian-legal contributors, it's probably not clear that the software follows the DFSG." [from URL above] debian-legal does not make statements: some of its contributors may support a statement, but I think there's one who opposes keeping almost anything copyable out of main. Hope that helps, -- MJR/slef Laux nur mia opinio: vidu http://people.debian.org/~mjr/ Bv sekvu http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
