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Re: about CC licenses



On Sun, 14 Jul 2013 09:44:57 +0200 Johannes Schauer wrote:

> Hi,

Hello Johannes,

> 
> just for a short confirmation:
> 
> I have a package which is licensed under CC-BY 2.0

Ouch!   :-(

> 
> This page [1] doesnt specifically list CC-BY 2.0 but I found this page [2]
> which explains why CC-BY 2.0 is not DFSG free.

Exactly, the summary [2] by Evan Prodromou is also linked from the wiki
page [1] (in the section about CC-by v1.0, which seems to be slightly
outdated, since it claims that CC-v2.0 are still under discussion...).

I confirm that works licensed under the terms of CC-by-v2.0 are
considered not acceptable for Debian main (in other words, they fail to
comply with the DFSG). 

> 
> My question is: is the resource as [2] still reflecting the correct reasons for
> why CC-BY 2.0 is not DFSG free?

I think it is, although please be aware that it is a summary of
debian-legal discussions, and *not* an official Debian Project
statement, as far as I know.

[...] 
> I am about to package software which is licensed under CC-BY 2.0 so it must
> probably go into non-free. This page [1] also doesnt talk about CC-BY
> 3.0 but if upstream would change the license version to 3.0  then it would be
> DFSG free, right?

In a nutshell, it would be accepted by the Debian Project, but I
personally disagree.
The status of CC-v3.0 licenses with respect to the Debian Project (and
to debian-legal and to me...) is summarized in
https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2010/01/msg00084.html

While you are at persuading upstream to re-license, I strongly
recommend that you persuade them to re-license (or, at least,
dual-license) under uncontroversially DFSG-free terms.
For instance, the work could be re-licensed (or dual-licensed) under
the Expat license [3] and nobody would have any doubt about the its
freeness!

[3] http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt

I hope this helps.
Bye.

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