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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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Re: Why do you have to chose the "Attribution" option with the new CC 2.0 Licenses?

From: evan AT wikitravel.org
To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: Why do you have to chose the "Attribution" option with the new CC 2.0 Licenses?
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 14:49:42 -0700

On Mon, Aug 16, 2004 at 08:56:59PM +0100, Rob Myers wrote:

> On 16 Aug 2004, at 20:50, evan AT wikitravel.org wrote:
>
> >Why do you think that (say) the Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike
> >2.0
> >licenses are non-free?
>
> http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary :
>
> "debian-legal contributors think that works licensed solely under the
> Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license [BY]_ are not free
> according to the DFSG and should not be included in Debian."
>
> "debian-legal contributors think that works licensed solely under the
> Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 [BY-SA]_ are not free according to the DFSG
> and
> should not be included in Debian."

I'm well aware of why _Debian_ thinks the licenses are non-free. I wanted to
hear another opinion.

> Attribution is a requirement that makes the licenses non-GPL compatible
> (as a kind of lesser-BSD-advertising-clause *).

That's _not_ why that (draft) summary says they're non-free. debian-legal is
pretty OK with the Attribution requirement. Not crazy about it, but
accepting that it's free.

The problems are mostly due to vaguenesses in the wording of the licenses.
There are places where the apparent intent is Free, but the wording used
could be interpreted as putting non-free restrictions. If those can be
corrected in the future, I think Debian would call by and by-sa Free.

~ESP

Re: Why do you have to chose the "Attribution" option with the new CC 2.0 Licenses? , (continued)