Re: [gNewSense-users] [Artwork] Is Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license acceptable for Official gNewSense Artwork?

[Dave Crossland]

(Sorry that this may be off topic, but I consider it on topic enough
to post - feel free to skip this post! :-)

On 13/11/06, MJ Ray <address@hidden> wrote:
> "Dave Crossland" <address@hidden> wrote:
> > More importantly, CC3 will be FDL compatible, I hear
>
> JOOI, where did you hear that?  I can't see how BY-SA could be made
> compatible without losing the Share-Alike effect, because FDL permits
> incorporation of uneditable material (Invariant Sections and others).

In short:

1. Works licensed under FDLv1 can usually be upgraded to FDLv2 because
of the "at your option any later version" phrase in the start/preamble

2. Works licensed under any CCvN can always be upgraded to CCvN+1
because of the "at your option any later version" phrase in the middle
of the license (that is not highlighted in the 'human readable' deed)

3. FDLv2 documentation with no invariant/etc sections can be upgraded to SFDLv1

4. SFDLv2 will be compatible with CC-BY-SAv3 or if not with v4...

5.

6. PROFIT!!!

This is based on my reading of the (S)FDL drafts up on gplv3.fsf.org
and background reading at

http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Archives#Eben_Moglen_and_Lawrence_Lessig_-_Document_Licenses_and_the_Future_of_Free_Culture

> > > Please don't use it for software or documentation,
> > Or is it software?
>
> Please use the GPL if you want to use a share-alike licence for artwork
> stored as software - that is, artwork as image files like jpegs, or as
> theme files.

Personally I will *probably* do this for works I get to chose the
license for; I can afford to wait to see what the upcoming versions of
all these licenses are like.

> Creative Commons has three main problems:
> 1. most of its variations are wordy and ambiguous;
> 2. it carves up the commons into several incompatible areas;
> 3. you cannot promote any of them without promoting the NC and ND
> variations, which are obviously incompatible with free software - I
> think RMS has commented on this in interviews in the recent past.

I agree; however, there are a lot of valuable projects out there under
CC-BY(-SA) and as the licenses cannot be switched, and their spirit is
free, I have no problem contributing to them.

For example, I recommend gNewSense use Tango artwork which is
CC-BY-SA. I wish it was GPL, but its not, and I can live with that.

> > [...] While I'm not that fussed
> > about what Debian thinks, since they include non-free software in
> > main, it is a consideration IMO.
>
> Non-free software in main is a bug for Debian, just as it is for
> gNewSense.

Okay, I've done a fair bit of reading about the Debian projects
general history wrt the FSF, and the current firmware issue.

The poll at http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=31126 (results at
http://master.debian.org/~jeroen/polls/firmware/results.txt ) suggests
that in Debian 5 ("Larry") the firmware will be in non-free
repositories.

However, the Debian/FSF schism in the 90s appears to be over the
existance of the non-free repositories in the first place. gNewSense
doesn't carry them; if Debian aspires to be as Free as gNewSense,
which I'd hope, then it needs to rm -rf the non-free repositories for
Larry too.

I doubt this is ever going to happen, though, so to speculate, perhaps
Fedora would change its firmware policy after Debian's lead, and since
it doesn't do non-free, it'll be 100% Free like gNewSense. Staying
close to evolutionary trunks is important for me, and if Fedora does
this I'll switch that way, I imagine.

> The project's failure to deal with this problem in a timely
> manner should not discount all of the analysis of the problem.

I also think that when I wrote "While I'm not that fussed about what
Debian thinks, since they include non-free software in main, it is a
consideration IMO.", I'm falling into Debian's supposition that there
should be a distinction between main and a total Debian repository.
This is like the suppositions around the phrase "intellectual
property", in that it confuses the issue.

So what I meant is "While I'm not that fussed about what Debian
thinks, since they include non-free software, it is a consideration
IMO." which is to say, as you do, that the project's failiures should
not discount the excellent analysese it produces.

--
Regards,
Dave