Re: Local community license issue

2012-01-08 Thread Charles Plessy 
Le Sat, Jan 07, 2012 at 07:35:02PM +0200, Victor Nitu a écrit :
 
 Is the GNU GPL a decent enough license to be applied to our
 contributors' work? Or any CC variant? What shall I answer to their
 question, as a community website co-founder?

Dear Victor,

if you and the other contributors are not worried that your works will be used
in proprietary derivatives, it may be most simple to take extremely liberal
licenses, like the Unlicense, or to explore the way the Translation Project
does, that is to promise to not exert copyrights.

  http://unlicense.org/

  http://translationproject.org/html/whydisclaim.html

Have a nice day,  

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan


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Re: Local community license issue

2012-01-08 Thread Clark C. Evans 
On Sun, Jan 8, 2012, at 06:10 PM, Charles Plessy wrote:
 if you and the other contributors are not worried that your works 
 will be used in proprietary derivatives, it may be most simple to 
 take extremely liberal licenses, like the Unlicense, or to explore 
 the way the Translation Project does, that is to promise to not 
 exert copyrights.
 
   http://unlicense.org/
 
   http://translationproject.org/html/whydisclaim.html

Charles,

I think if you're looking for a public domain statement for the
Translation Project, I'd use the C0 instead of Unlicense.  The 
C0 license is endorsed by the FSF and will likely be listed as
a valid open source license by the OSI.  By contrast, the Unlicense
is viewed by some legal professionals as being quite problematic.

There was a brief mention of Unlicense on the OSI's license-review
list this past week, here's a quote from Rick Moen:

| I hadn't seen Unlicense before now, but my immediate impression is
that
| it's not well formed and should be avoided.
|
| Its first sentence professes to put the covered work into the public
| domain.  However, then the second sentence professes to grant reserved
| rights under copyright law.  However, who is granting those rights,
the
| erstwhile copyright holder who, one sentence earlier, professed to
| destroy his or her own title?
| 
| By contrast, CC0 states explicitly that the current copyright holder 
| is attempting (I paraphrase) to the extent permitted by local law to
| disavow in perpetuity and on behalf of all successors all reserved
| rights, and _if that is locally unsuccessful_ grants a permissive
| license under his/her powers as copyright owner.
|
| I realize there are a whole lot of software engineers out there who'd
| like to handwave copyright law out of their lives (including you), but
| it'd be really nice if they'd occasionally bother to consult suitable
| legal help before shooting themselves and others in the foot.
 
If you're interested in more, here is a followup message.

http://projects.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012-January/52.html


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Re: Local community license issue

2012-01-07 Thread Francesco Poli 
On Sat, 07 Jan 2012 19:35:02 +0200 Victor Nitu wrote:

[...]
 Hello,

Hi Victor,
thanks for taking this kind of licensing issues seriously!

[...]
 Some of the willing contributors asked then: what will happen to the
 content delivered by us?, a question regarding the license for the new
 content to be released under.

If we are talking about new original material (rather than
re-adaptations or modifications of pre-existing material), it would be
great if you could persuade contributors to license their works in a
DFSG-free manner, adopting a widely used and well understood Free
Software license.

 Is the GNU GPL a decent enough license to be applied to our
 contributors' work?

I think the GNU GPL is a perfectly fine license for documentation,
tutorials, guides, manuals and the like.
I personally would recommend the GNU GPL v2 (with or without the or
later mechanism, depending on what the authors think about the GNU GPL
v3 and on how much they trust the FSF to always publish good licenses
in the future).

Another license that can be recommended is the Expat/MIT license:
http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt
This is a simple permissive non-copyleft license that meets the DFSG
and is GPL-compatible.
It is especially appropriate for authors who dislike copyleft licenses,
and prefer being more permissive.

 Or any CC variant?

No, please!
CC licenses are controversial: FTP-masters currently accept CC-by-v3.0
and CC-by-sa-v3.0 as DFSG-free, but I personally think that they are
wrong in doing so.
I am convinced that CC licenses fail to meet the DFSG.

See
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2010/01/msg00084.html
and, if you want to read my own analyses,
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/07/msg00124.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/03/msg00105.html

 What shall I answer to their
 question, as a community website co-founder?

As I said above, I think you should try to persuade contributors to
license their works in a DFSG-free and GPL-compatible way.
*Especially* if some of these works are intended to be submitted for
inclusion in Debian!

 
 I am subscribed to this list, so no need to cc me, so please help me out
 of this problem.
 Since this was raised, I admit I haven't looked too deep in the d.o main
 site, unfortunately I was lacking the time needed for this.

Please do *not* follow the example of the official Debian web site,
which is unfortunately licensed in a non-free manner:
http://bugs.debian.org/238245
As you can see, this issue is still unfixed, so please let's *not*
propagate it elsewhere!

 
 FYI, the work consists mostly of tutorials (using, packaging, patching
 a.o.), guides, documentation, translations (some of them to be submitted
 to their respective package in Debian via BTS), some scripts and other
 various tools and resources.

Translations should be licensed under the same terms of the original
work. Whenever the original work is licensed under the terms of a
copyleft license, they also *must* be licensed under the same terms (or
anyway under compatible terms).

All the other mentioned types of works should be licensed in a DFSG-free
manner: see my recommendations above.


I hope this helps.
Bye, and thanks for getting in touch with us.


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