Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Daniel Carrera <dcarrera AT math.umd.edu>]

Hello everyone,

I am the lead of the OpenOffice.org user guide. Right now we use Sun's 
Public Documentation License, but I want to move to the CC-BY. The PDL is 
inconvenient, complicated, and it's a bit of a "walled garden".

So I asked my team about swithing to the CC-BY. The response was very 
positive. Everyone likes the CC-BY. HOWEVER, there is one point of 
concern. CC-BY is considered "non-free" by Debian.

http://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/dls-006-ccby

This is bad. Many people won't contribute under a license Debian deems 
"non-free". So I went to the Debian-legal list and asked them to elaborate 
on their concerns. They said the license is "essentially" free, excpet for 
some ambiguities. It's ambiguity that they are concerned about:

1) When you make a derivative, it is not clear whether the name of the 
original author must be *prominent*. My reading is that it doesn't have to 
be. Rather, that it simply says that the original author must be no less 
prominent than you. So, for example, an appendix with a list of 
contributors would do fine.

If this is what the license means, Debian will be happy.

2) When any Licensor asks, all references to their name(s) must be purged 
from the work. This can have unintended consequences. For example, I could 
tell you to pull my name out of the biography, if I disagree with one of 
your opinions. Or if I'm a competitor and don't want your book to sell as 
much as mine. You get the idea. Debian is okay with the general concept of 
attribution, and agrees that you may not want to be listed as an author 
for a work you didn't make. It is the more extreme scenario that poses 
concern. Using the CC-BY license could become "you can use my work as 
long as I like what you have to say".

I don't know if CC and Debian can agree on something here, but I thought 
I'd mention.

3) The text on a white background at the end of the page. "Creative
Commons is not a party to this License..." blah blah blah.

Except for the background change, there is no indication that this text
is not part of the license. Now, we "know" that it isn't, because there
is an HTML comment that says:

<!-- BREAKOUT FOR CC NOTICE. NOT A PART OF THE LICENSE -->

If this same thing was visible on the browser, that would be enough. Just
put a heading that says "CC Notice. Not a part of the license".

That would be enough.


This last one is the easiest to change. It doesn't involve touching the 
licenses. Would it be possible to have this last item fixed soon? I think 
that Debian would take it well.

Cheers,
-- 
Daniel Carrera          | I don't want it perfect,
Join OOoAuthors today!  | I want it Tuesday.
http://oooauthors.org   |