On Tue, 09 Jan 2007 10:35:51 -0800 Jeff Carr wrote: > On 01/09/07 02:10, MJ Ray wrote: [...] > > Care to explain? > > Sure. Let me start with this general background premise: > > The creative commons is a group that is an ally to Debian and the free > software movement. This may or may not be true: it depends on what CC did in the past, does at present, and will do in the future. I'll avoid expressing my personal opinion here, because we are (or should be) talking about the DFSG-freeness of CC-licensed works: discussions about who is ally to whom would lead us far away from the topic... > We have a bunch of world class legal minds trying > to help work within a legal framework to provide protection for > various projects and works that can help the free software movement. Drafting and actively promoting licenses that forbid commercial use and/or modifications harms the free software movement, rather than helping it. > The CC lawyers are trying to draft a generic, useful and good license. Useful to *whom*? Useful to end users and to the community (and hence to the society)? Or rather useful to authors that are not willing to grant important freedoms to recipients of their works? > > I think that's worth keeping in mind and repeating on this issue :) > > In the conversations like the ones you sent links for above, there are > many theoretical examples of how the license may be used for bad or > non-DSFG purposes. Those are mostly ignored by the CC guys (as far as > I can tell) and are unconvincing for me for the same reason: > > The lawyers are looking for legal problems. Positive feedback about > the legal aspects are helpful. Here (on debian-legal) we are interested in licenses that grant the important freedoms in a legally sound way. The important freedoms are the ones that follow from the spirit of the DFSG. Hence, I don't know what the lawyers are looking for, but a license that grants too few permissions is not OK to me, even if it does so in a legally perfect manner. > One good read on the subject of > potential legal problems I've seen: > http://fr.creativecommons.org/articles/sweden.htm I will give a read to that, when I have time. But take into account that I am little interested in precise definitions of non-commercial, since I support licenses that do *not* dicriminate against commercial activities (whatever "commercial" may mean). > > I remain unconvinced that the CC lawyers and advisers don't have > reasons to add an optional non-commercial clause for a purpose that > will be important to free software in the future and in alignment with > the intent of the DSFG. As I already said, forbidding commercial use is definitely *against* the spirit of free software and the intent of the DFSG. Hence, I cannot imagine a reason why doing so could be "important to free software". P.S.: apologies if anyone receives basically this same message twice, but it seems that lists.d.o is loosing messages somehow (even the web archives show some "Message not available" entry); I don't know if my previous try to send this message will ever reach the list (I haven't yet received it back and the archives don't show it yet). -- http://frx.netsons.org/progs/scripts/releas-o-meter.html Try our amazing Releas-o-meter! ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == C979 F34B 27CE 5CD8 DC12 31B5 78F4 279B DD6D FCF4
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