Re: DEP licenses

[Lucas Nussbaum]

(Dropping Cc on -project, adding To to -legal. If you reply, please
maintain the Cc list)

Hi debian-legal,

On 29/05/08 at 13:54 +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:

> On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 01:51:33PM +0300, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> > I'm not sure what would be the best practical license for DEPs, so I'm
> > hesitant to recommend one at this point. Perhaps one of the Creative
> > Commons ones? The current batch has some free ones, right?
>
> If we really want to provide a default, an interesting one would be a
> license which requires changing title/authorship upon changes, just to
> distinguish the "official" DEP document from derivatives. I've no idea
> if something free like that exists or not, but in principle it doesn't
> look like that different from DFSG-free licenses requiring the
> distribution in patch format (or maybe we can directly go for one of
> them?).
>
> Note that this is not a requirement, as the official DEP document will
> always be available from dep.debian.net, but as a default it would make
> sense.

We are looking for a license that could be recommended as a "default"
license for DEPs in DEP0.

The subthread on -project starts with
http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2008/05/msg00066.html

The basic requirements are: (AFAIK)
- not copylefted, so we can include the document in another document
- suitable for documents
- require changing title/authorship upon changes (see above)

Could you recommend one?

Thank you,
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[Don Armstrong]

On Thu, 29 May 2008, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> The basic requirements are: (AFAIK)
> - not copylefted, so we can include the document in another document
> - suitable for documents
> - require changing title/authorship upon changes (see above)

There's really no need to require changing the title, since official
DEP can be dealt with by just distributing them with a known site and
signing them with appropriate keys or similar, and you can handle
derivatives simply by suggesting that they change the title.

> Could you recommend one?

MIT/X11 with minor changes:

-----------

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of this work and associated files (the "Work"), to deal in the
Work without restriction, including without limitation the rights to
use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Work, and to permit persons to whom the Work is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Work.

THE WORK IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
IN NO EVENT SHALL ANY CONTRIBUTORS TO THE WORK BE LIABLE FOR ANY
CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,
TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE WORK
OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE WORK.

Except as contained in this notice, the name(s) of the contributors to
this Work shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the
sale, use or other dealings in this Work without prior written
authorization from the contributor(s) whose name(s) are to be used.

-----------


Don Armstrong

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[Ben Finney-2]

Don Armstrong <don@...> writes:

> MIT/X11 with minor changes:

When recommending, it's best to refer to this as the terms of the
"Expat license" (of which there has only ever been one version), not
"MIT/X11 license" which is a more ambiguous name (several licenses
meet that description, not all of them free).

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[Francesco Poli-2]

On Fri, 30 May 2008 08:12:05 +1000 Ben Finney wrote:

> Don Armstrong <don@...> writes:
>
> > MIT/X11 with minor changes:
>
> When recommending, it's best to refer to this as the terms of the
> "Expat license" (of which there has only ever been one version), not
> "MIT/X11 license" which is a more ambiguous name (several licenses
> meet that description, not all of them free).

Actually, the Expat license lacks the final no-advertisement clause:
see <http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt>, which is the official URL
for the Expat license, AFAICT.

Anyway, I would recommend the unmodified Expat license for DEPs, in
order to avoid license proliferation...


P.S.: Other repliers seem to have forgotten to add the requested Cc:s
      I re-added them (anyone who feels out of context is encouraged to
      take a look at the thread on debian-legal web archives...)

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[Simon Josefsson-2]

Lars Wirzenius <liw@...> writes:

>         License
>         -------
>        
>         The DEP must have a license that is DFSG free.
>
> I've just pushed that to http://bzr.debian.org/dep/dep0/trunk/ (I didn't
> think that needs any discussion; if I was wrong, it's easy enough to
> revert).
>
> I'm not sure if there's a consensus on which license to pick for all
> DEPs. Comments on that are welcome.

The problem with allowing any DFSG free license is that it may mean that
the license for DEPx may be incompatible with DEPy.  If a DEPz wants to
combine, or just re-use portions of, DEPx and DEPy, the license of DEPz
will be quite complex.

I believe it would lead to less problems to require that all DEPs are
licensed under a liberal and widely compatible license, such as the
Expat, X11 or the modified BSD license.

/Simon


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[Lars Wirzenius-2]

pe, 2008-05-30 kello 11:42 +0200, Simon Josefsson kirjoitti:
> I believe it would lead to less problems to require that all DEPs are
> licensed under a liberal and widely compatible license, such as the
> Expat, X11 or the modified BSD license.

I agree that that would be more convenient. I don't know if there's
consensus that we should do it. However, if no-one objects within a
couple of weeks, I'll add a suggestion to use the Expat license in a
couple of weeks or so.



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[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 01:35:49PM +0300, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> pe, 2008-05-30 kello 11:42 +0200, Simon Josefsson kirjoitti:
> > I believe it would lead to less problems to require that all DEPs are
> > licensed under a liberal and widely compatible license, such as the
> > Expat, X11 or the modified BSD license.
> I agree that that would be more convenient. I don't know if there's

AOL

> consensus that we should do it. However, if no-one objects within a
> couple of weeks, I'll add a suggestion to use the Expat license in a
> couple of weeks or so.

Please go ahead, just a couple of suggestion:

- please mention why Expat is being suggested, the scenario of packing
  DEPs together should be enough to convince the reader IMO

- please mention the fact that Expat is kinda MIT/X11 with <add the
  feature I forgot here>, I feel the "Expat" name can sound weird to a
  lot of non -legal readers

Cheers.

--
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- PhD in Computer Science ............... now what?
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[Ben Finney-2]

Lars Wirzenius <liw@...> writes:

> I agree that that would be more convenient. I don't know if there's
> consensus that we should do it. However, if no-one objects within a
> couple of weeks, I'll add a suggestion to use the Expat license in a
> couple of weeks or so.

I would prefer to recommend a copyleft such as the GPL, simply to
encourage more free works.

However, if the consensus is to go with Expat for DEPs, I have no
specific objection.

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[MJ Ray-2]

Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@...> wrote:
> On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 01:35:49PM +0300, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> > consensus that we should do it. However, if no-one objects within a
> > couple of weeks, I'll add a suggestion to use the Expat license in a
> > couple of weeks or so.

I agree that we should suggest the Expat licence.  We're trying to
spread our ideas widely in a crowded market, which is similar to the
commonly-accepted motives to use the LGPL instead of the GPL.

Also, the Creative Commons licences are not all free software licences.

> Please go ahead, just a couple of suggestion:
>
> - please mention why Expat is being suggested, the scenario of packing
>   DEPs together should be enough to convince the reader IMO

I'd agree that we should mention that Expat is suggested to allow easy
combination of DEPs.  However, "packing DEPs together" does not have
major problems, so isn't a good scenario.

> - please mention the fact that Expat is kinda MIT/X11 with <add the
>   feature I forgot here>, I feel the "Expat" name can sound weird to a
>   lot of non -legal readers

I don't think Expat has any significant additional feature.  Expat is
usually used as the name to avoid the ambiguity caused by referring to
MIT, X11 or BSD (each of which has used several very different
licences over time) and for an explicit inclusion of "associated
documentation files" as "Software".  However, it's not in
common-licenses (yet?).

Regards,
--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
Please follow http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct


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[Francesco Poli-2]

On Mon, 02 Jun 2008 12:07:07 +0100 MJ Ray wrote:

> Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@...> wrote:
> > On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 01:35:49PM +0300, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> > > consensus that we should do it. However, if no-one objects within a
> > > couple of weeks, I'll add a suggestion to use the Expat license in a
> > > couple of weeks or so.
>
> I agree that we should suggest the Expat licence.

So do I.

[...]
> Also, the Creative Commons licences are not all free software licences.

I personally think that *none* of them[1] meet the DFSG.
Unfortunately, FTP-masters seem to disagree with me...
Anyone who would like to read further details on my view on the topic
could start by taking a look at previous debian-legal discussions[2][3].

[1] excluding the public domain dedication (which is not a license
anyway) and the re-branded licenses (CC-GNU GPL, CC-GNU LGPL, BSD,
which are externally developed CC-re-branded licenses)...
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/09/msg00076.html
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/09/msg00126.html

[...]

> > - please mention the fact that Expat is kinda MIT/X11 with <add the
> >   feature I forgot here>, I feel the "Expat" name can sound weird to a
> >   lot of non -legal readers
>
> I don't think Expat has any significant additional feature.  Expat is
> usually used as the name to avoid the ambiguity caused by referring to
> MIT, X11 or BSD (each of which has used several very different
> licences over time) and for an explicit inclusion of "associated
> documentation files" as "Software".  However, it's not in
> common-licenses (yet?).

I personally would like to see the Expat license
in /usr/share/common-licenses/.
Please see bug #284340 [4], which was unfortunately tagged wontfix...

[4] http://bugs.debian.org/284340


Big disclaimers: IANAL, TINLA, IANADD, TINASOTODP.

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[Julien Cristau-6]

On Mon, Jun  2, 2008 at 14:42:46 +0200, Francesco Poli wrote:

> I personally think that *none* of them[1] meet the DFSG.

Yes, you've said that multiple times now.

> Unfortunately, FTP-masters seem to disagree with me...
> Anyone who would like to read further details on my view on the topic
> could start by taking a look at previous debian-legal discussions[2][3].
>
Can you please stop this?  The FTP-masters' opinion is what matters
here, not yours.  Rehashing the fact that you disagree doesn't help
anything.

Cheers,
Julien


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[Russ Allbery-2]

MJ Ray <mjr@...> writes:

> I don't think Expat has any significant additional feature.  Expat is
> usually used as the name to avoid the ambiguity caused by referring to
> MIT, X11 or BSD (each of which has used several very different licences
> over time) and for an explicit inclusion of "associated documentation
> files" as "Software".  However, it's not in common-licenses (yet?).

The purpose of common-licenses is not to collect all DFSG-free licenses.
The criteria is the number of packages in Debian that use that license,
particularly by popularity.  Licenses go into common-licenses when they
save substantial space, essentially.

If someone wants to do the analysis work to show that this is true of the
Expat license and it looks reasonable (>100 packages, preferrably >200
packages, including fairly widely installed ones -- I feel the most
comfortable if at least 1/5th of the systems reporting in popcon have at
least a couple of packages installed that use that license), then please
file a bug against debian-policy with the details of that analysis.

The BSD license currently in common-licenses is something of an anomoly,
and were we doing it all over again, it would probably not be there since
it usually can't be referenced correctly by packages (it lists a specific
copyright holder).  But it's not clear to me whether it's worth the effort
to withdraw it or change it at this point.

--
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[Lars Wirzenius-5]

pe, 2008-05-30 kello 13:35 +0300, Lars Wirzenius kirjoitti:
> pe, 2008-05-30 kello 11:42 +0200, Simon Josefsson kirjoitti:
> > I believe it would lead to less problems to require that all DEPs are
> > licensed under a liberal and widely compatible license, such as the
> > Expat, X11 or the modified BSD license.
>
> I agree that that would be more convenient. I don't know if there's
> consensus that we should do it. However, if no-one objects within a
> couple of weeks, I'll add a suggestion to use the Expat license in a
> couple of weeks or so.

Done. The change is now in the DEP bzr repository.



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