Re: Acceptability of a documentation license for Debian

[Walter Landry <wlandry@caltech.edu>]

J.B. Nicholson writes:
> Jeffrey H. Johnson wrote:
>> Redistribution and use in ‘source’ [...] and ‘compiled’ forms [...] in whole or in
>> part, for any purpose, including commercial applications, with or without
>> modification, in any medium, is hereby permitted, without fee or royalty, provided
>> that the following conditions are met:
>
> Prohibiting distribution for a fee is non-free is a clear violation of
> DFSG 1 (per https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines). Also,
> prohibiting distribution for a fee while allowing redistribution in
> "commercial applications" is confusing.

The license looks to me like it is saying that anyone distributing the
work does not have to pay a fee to the original author.  It does not
prohibit the distributor from imposing fees on end recipients.
Otherwise, the blurb about 'commercial applications' would be
contradictory.

As a whole, I could not find anything wrong with the license, though I
did not look too carefully.  The definition of 'source' and
'compiled' forms is a bit sloppy.  I certainly would not recommend it.
This looks equivalent to CC-BY

  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

so I would use that instead.

Cheers,
Walter Landry