Florian Cramer on Fri, 30 Jul 2004 21:57:28 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Debian project finds Creative Commons licenses non-free |
The Debian legal team has evaluated all Creative Commons licenses and found them non-free according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) <http://www.debian.org/social_contract.html>. The DFSG are widely considered the standard criteria of Free Software and Open Source (since the Open Source Definition <http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php> is based on the DFSG). Even the Creative Commons ShareAlike license, which resembles the GPL, and the CC Attribution license, which resembles the BSD/MIT license, are considered non-free by Debian. The gory legal details of the explanation can be found in <http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/07/msg01193.html>. The authors conclude: "debian-legal contributors recommend that authors who wish to create works compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines should not use any of the licenses in the Creative Commons license suite. Authors who use or are planning to use a Creative Commons license that includes the NonCommercial or NoDerivs license elements should understand that these restrictions are incompatible with Free Software. Authors who use or are planning to use the Attribution 2.0 license should consider a similar Free Software license such as a BSD- or MIT-style license. Authors who use or are planning to use the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license should consider a similar Free Software license such as the General Public License [GPL]." To make the Creative Commons Attribution and ShareAlike licenses free=20 by the standards of the DFSG, the authors suggest to change six points in them. For the time being, software documentation and other works released under Creative Commons licenses can not be part of Free Software/Open Source operating system distributions like Debian GNU/Linux. -F --=20 http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/ --qtZFehHsKgwS5rPz Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc" Content-Description: Digital signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFBClIRPBf+9GN6D0oRAoEhAKDL+TxtJqg25+3c+wT8RX3IVS990wCfR2I6 poy/deK5cV/xOeT6Wt2y5vM= =H1u5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --qtZFehHsKgwS5rPz-- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net