Bug#383316: FretsOnFire
Hi Jason, I've also been looking at this, I posted a couple of times to
debian-legal for advice.
On Fri, 9 Feb 2007, Jason Spiro wrote:
I am not sure about the miscellaneous data. I assume the authors
wanted to license it under the full Creative Commons Attribution 2.5
license legal code[3] which does not seem to be Debian-free[4].
What is in the copying.txt is not the CC-by-2.5, it's a summary which
doesn't contain all the problematic clauses. There are two options:
either upstream wanted what's in the copying.txt, in which case
debian-legal recommend asking them to change to expat; or they wanted
the actual CC-by-2.5, which is not DFSG-free and we'd need to convince
them to use expat, GPL or something similar.
== What to do about the rest ==
I propose we politely ask upstream if they could get the license for
the songs and miscellaneous data changed to the GPL. This would make
things very simple.
If not, perhaps they could GPL the tutorial and miscellaneous data,
and allow the songs to be freely used and noncommercially distributed
by anyone. AFAIK this would allow the main game to get into main, and
the songs to get into Debian non-free. It would also allow many other
free Unixes to redistribute the game and the songs.
The game would probably have to go into contrib in that case since it
really depends on the songs; unless we can get a few other songs in the
main package and have them as -extras in non-free. I've been asking
around about getting some songs done.
It's unclear to me why the songs aren't redistributable. Are the
copyright holders of the songs also upstream? or are they a third party?
If they are upstream, convincing them to relicence them would be good.
The explanation Miriam had seems rather odd---if they copyright holders
agree to licence them the agency which was linked to should have nothing
to do with it. OTOH, if they are using songs which aren't original by
them, there could be a problem.
Matt
--
Matthew Johnson
http://www.matthew.ath.cx/
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