Re: Yet another bunch of licences

[Juhapekka Tolvanen <juhtolv@cc.jyu.fi>]

On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, +18:05:02 EET (UTC +0200),
Lawrence Lessig <lessig@pobox.com> pressed some keys:

> On 2/10/03 3:38 PM, "Juhapekka Tolvanen" <juhtolv@cc.jyu.fi> wrote:

> > But it would be really irritating situation, if somebody creates
> > nice software documentation that is meant to be free, and then
> > she/he is faced with fact, that Debian refuse to package it in main,
> > because he picked some non-free licence from Creative Commons
> > licences. So, you'd better warn people.

> I would be very interested in resolving whether, e.g., the copyleft CC
> license is free. 

Well, people of debian-legal -mailinglist already found some problems in
those three licences that has potential to be or potential to become
free licences.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200302/threads.html

http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200302/msg00084.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200302/msg00087.html

I could not find any mention about source code or source data. Is this
acceptable according to those licences?:

- Take LaTeX-sources of original document and modify them. Compile it to
  DVI and PostScript and distribute that modified version only in
  PostScript-format.

- Just like above, but take SGML- or XML-sources of some document.

- Take music-module (XM, IT, S3M, MOD etc.) created by some cool
  demo scene dude (or dudette) and modify it with module tracker
  software. Convert modified version to WAV-format and encode it to
  Ogg Vorbis-format. Then distribute modified version only in Ogg
  Vorbis-format.

I prefer Design Science Licence (http://www.dsl.org/copyleft/dsl.txt),
because it explicitly requires distribution in source data format. It
has this kind of definition for source data format:

---- Clip here ----
"Source Data" shall mean the origin of the Object Form, being the
entire, machine-readable, preferred form of the Work for copying and
for human modification (usually the language, encoding or format in
which composed or recorded by the Author); plus any accompanying
files, scripts or other data necessary for installation, configuration
or compilation of the Work.

(Examples of "Source Data" include, but are not limited to, the
following: if the Work is an image file composed and edited in PNG
format, then the original PNG source file is the Source Data; if the
Work is an MPEG 1.0 layer 3 digital audio recording made from a WAV
format audio file recording of an analog source, then the original WAV
file is the Source Data; if the Work was composed as an unformatted
plaintext file, then that file is the Source Data; if the Work was
composed in LaTeX, the LaTeX file(s) and any image files and/or custom
macros necessary for compilation constitute the Source Data.)
---- Clip here ----


-- 
Juhapekka "naula" Tolvanen * University of Jyväskylä * juhtolv@st.jyu.fi
http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~juhtolv/index.html * * "STRAIGHT BUT NOT NARROW!!"
"Yksin talon pimeydessä istuu valtaistuimellaan lapsi silmin
lasittunein. Itkee sähkön valtamereen."                              CMX