Re: Creative Commons "negotiations"

[Evan Prodromou <evan@debian.org>]

On Tue, 2006-24-01 at 19:40 +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
> is there any public information about the progress in the talks with CC
> about clarification/amelioration/whatever of their licenses?
No, but that's just because I've been lazy and haven't done a proper report to d-d-a.

Here's the poop, in a nutshell: after a few months of back-and-forths, we worked out a draft license that the working group felt was compatible with the DFSG. CC hopes to apply the changes to the upcoming CC 3.0 license suite draft, and that version will be available for public review. Unless there are other changes that make the licenses non-free (they're dealing with other groups besides Debian, of course), the 3.0 Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike licenses should be DFSG-compatible and we should allow works available under those licenses in main.

Works under CC licenses with the NoDerivs or NonCommercial elements will still be incompatible with the DFSG, of course, and works under 1.0, 2.0, and 2.5 versions of the Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike licenses will still be incompatible. But for upstream projects that use earlier versions of by or by-sa, there should be a clear upgrade path.

I don't have an idea of when the 3.0 license draft will be available, what other changes there may be, or pretty much where things go from here. But I do know that CC seems to take DFSG-compatibility seriously and that they're going to be open to our input.

I've been putting off doing a detailed report for a while, but that's the gist.

~Evan

--
Evan Prodromou <evan@debian.org>
The Debian Project (http://www.debian.org/)