Creative Commons 2.0 license suite

[Evan Prodromou]

Ernest Prabhakar wrote:

> Hi Evan,
>
Hi, Ernest!

> Very interested, thanks.   I particularly found your summary of 
> recommendations (below) of the most interest, as I felt they captured 
> in minimal form the issues hindering "DFSG-freedom." As you note, 
> these seem to more be excessive vagueness than explicit impropriety.

Yep.

One fine point worth noting is that we don't have any packages proposed 
for use in Debian yet that are CC-licensed, but some upstream developers 
are considering CC licenses for documentation, and other stuff like 
images for games and desktop environments are wafting around. So we 
kinda figured that we should deal with this sooner rather than later.

Anyways, my point here is that the issues that debian-legal has with the 
CC licenses are more discomfort than anything else. Almost all come from 
text that looks to be well-intentioned but as written is subject to abuse.

> a) you've communicated these concerns/suggestions to Larry et al, and 
> if so how they've responded

I'm pretty sure Creative Commons is aware of most of these issues. This 
is just a draft right now, and I figured that it'd be worthwhile to get 
some opinions from this list (like, say, someone who could provide legal 
definitions for terms like "any reference" or "any other comparable 
authorship credit" that would allay d-l's concerns).

At some point this document will be in a final version and I (or someone 
else from Debian) will make some kind of formal presentation of the doc 
to Creative Commons. Right now we're trying to shake down the issues and 
make sure we give good recommendations before doing so.

> b) people think these factors would also create OSD non-conformance 

I'm unclear on that one. The Creative Commons licenses haven't been 
submit for OSI approval, and interest within that organization seems 
lukewarm.

Anyways, thanks for your comments.

~ESP