Re: better licence for fosdem, debconf, .., videos...

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org>]

(Grr.  d-legal has been silently dropping my mails for a while now, and
I only just noticed.)

On Wed, Mar 08, 2006 at 08:59:37PM -0500, Joe Smith wrote:
> >The license must allow modifications and derived works,
> It does allow those.
> >and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license
> >of the original software.
> It does allow that.
>
> There is nothing in #3 to prevent restrictions on modified works.

This seems close to arguing: "DFSG#3 can't reasonably be read to forbid all
restrictions on modifications, therefore it must be read to allow them
all".  That conclusion is equally wrong, but at the opposite extreme.

If DFSG#3 is read as not preventing restrictions on modified works, then
it becomes an effective no-op.  It's meaningless to say "we require
permission to make modified works, but you can place whatever heinous
restrictions on doing so that you wish".

The line is somewhere in between those two extremes, subject to the
judgement of Debian.  Being guidelines and not rules, the DFSG doesn't
tell us exactly where that line lies.

(The same applies to DFSG#1, and the rest.)

> This restiction only in the Scotland version only requires removal of
> attribution in the form found in the copyright message (or equivlent).

Huh?  Copyright notices are not attribution, they're statements of
copyright.  There may be contributors who deserve attribution but
have no copyright claim; for example, they may have placed their
contributions into the public domain.  I typically put copyright notices
at the bottom of source files, so they're available but unintrusive;
attributions at the top.

Is it even legal, even on request, to remove a person's name from a
copyright notice if they havn't actually released the work into the
public domain?  They still have a copyright claim, so it seems like
a misleading copyright notice.

--
Glenn Maynard