Re: Local community license issue
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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120108091050.gd1...@merveille.plessy.net
Re: Local community license issue
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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/1326034309.31174.140661020729...@webmail.messagingengine.com
Local community license issue
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Hello, I have a (small) licensing issue regarding local community work in service of our debian-linux.ro website. A couple of days ago we've made a call for editors, for supporting and filling the blanks in our revamped community website. 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. After linking them to the DFSG and Debian Social Contract definitions, I wondered if I could come over here and address the question directly to Debian project, mostly because I started wondering about other local communities and their way of managing issues like this one. 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? 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. 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. Kind regards, - -- Victor Nitu . vic...@debian-linux.ro sip:victor.n...@ekiga.net ` -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Debian GNU/Linux - Romania iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJPCIJGAAoJEMn1b0XNY6wKgcQH/3aSeciOYCFyc5yAvdhW/Cds NQuhsK1E/nvwXRDxuwjT+xb3XSm7EddgzyHOH0fYxcqYUvCYWrnWvDuZX3gV4ub6 O6uhmplrdzD9EDafQVAl4hWonYi1APzW3W6C0wsZz1FIS/KH4cud6xMw6NYCFv54 faPCmieJKLoVrqsBwypAqJxYD/hHi4ParrcXVlTaCqXHM+uUMHnq8drdUjP3Gil0 tUUyv7BlOrZ3oMS9YZmXCOpF+6uKUmG22XG6LTabFxA4ErnEjNeCER4YIzvvEtcr FmIoMlpXLaJtuSZlHkjxaUsUuK5vwl389Pw0a2Tei3KTc/jEhv2F9m9dud8U0Bw= =h75O -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4f088246.7040...@debian-linux.ro
Re: Local community license issue
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. -- http://www.inventati.org/frx/frx-gpg-key-transition-2010.txt New GnuPG key, see the transition document! . Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == CA01 1147 9CD2 EFDF FB82 3925 3E1C 27E1 1F69 BFFE pgpNFWphRlt9z.pgp Description: PGP signature