Re: CMU LTI Licence

[Michael Poole <mdpoole@troilus.org>]

Ben Finney writes:

>> ##  5. Any commercial, public or published work that uses this data      ##
>> ##     must contain a clearly visible acknowledgment as to the           ##
>> ##     provenance of the data.                                           ##
>
> I don't really know what this means. It clearly places a restriction on
> a field of endeavour (“commercial, public or published work”), but I
> don't know whether it violates DFSG §6. Other opinions required.

This feels like a clarification or amplification of the copyright
notice, similar to GPLv2's section 2(c) about start-up banners.

The only way that I can see a work being neither public nor published is
if it is kept for proprietary, internal use by the developer.  (Is there
commercial software that is neither public nor published?)  Copyleft
licenses have restrictions on the field of endeavor known as
distributing derived software, and the scope of this clause appears to
be the same.  To me, it seems strictly more permissive than most
copyleft provisions, and on that basis I don't see a DFSG problem.

Michael Poole (neither Debian developer nor lawyer)