Re: "Licences Wars"

On Sat, Nov 8, 2008 at 7:24 AM, Shlomi Fish <shlomif-ik1l9ssToec+JF/[email protected]> wrote:

> On Friday 07 November 2008, Amit Aronovitch wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 1:33 AM, Shlomi Fish <shlomif-ik1l9ssToec+JF/[email protected]> wrote:
> > > Now. The first thing I'll mention is that it is not entirely agreed
> upon
> > > which
> > > licences are free/open-source and which are not:
> > >
> > > The original Artistic Licence (authored by Larry Wall for
> dual-licensing
> > > perl)
> > > is:
> > >
> > > * considered non-free (and non-GPL-compatible) by the FSF
> > >
> > > * considered free by Debian.
> > >
> > > * considered non-free by RedHat.
> > >
> > > * considered free by Mandriva.
> > >
> > > * considered open-source by the OSI -
> > > http://www.opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license-1.0.php
> > >
> > > * was considered a contract in a certain judgement:
> > >
> > > http://lwn.net/Articles/246695/
> > >
> > > (Who are you going to believe?)
> >
> > Possibly all. The reason is that "freeness" is not a boolean parameter.
> Not
> > even a single parameter real-valued scale. There are multiple criteria,
> > possibly contradicting each other. Much like human rights...
> > It is much more practical to talk about specific definitions, such as
> > OSI-free/DFSG-free/FSF-free etc.
> > As your examples clearly demonstrate, these do not comply to a total
> > ordering (in the mathematical sense:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_order ).
> >
> > You should decide how you *want* your work to be distributed and choose
> the
> > license accordingly (effectively decide which criteria should take
> > priority). CC has a nice mechanism for it.
>
> Well, generally speaking one should strive for endorsement as free (and
> preferably GPL-compatibility) by everybody. Otherwise, you may be facing
> problems.


In this case, your recommendations are also not free enough. Only license
that would work is something like:
"You can do with this work whatever you like, even claim that you did it all
by yourself, no need to mention me. However, you still have the right to sue
me if it does not work".
The reason you don't find any license like that is because authors normally
want to assure at least some of their own rights, and that comes at the
expense of the "freedoms" of the end users. The question is how you
prioritize these freedoms.

You actually want "endorsement as free" not really by *everybody*, just by a
specific list of organizations which you consider relevant for your beliefs
and for the projects you work on.

As for CC, the standard CC licences
> (CC-by/CC-by-sa/CC-by-nc-sa/CC-by-nd/etc.) are not suitable for software
> due
> to their attribution clause:
>
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html
>
> In fact, the Creative Commons does not let you choose "software" as the
> type
> of artwork, when filling their form.
>

I'm not sure what you mean, but it seems that the discussion in your link is
irrelevant. It speaks about the specific case of attribution in "advertising
materials" (you can't make effective ads if they must include 100
attributions).
The CC attribution clause says only that you must attribute "in the manner
specified by the author" - this in itself places no restriction, all depends
on what the author explicitly requires.


>
> >
> > > The Creative Commons Attribution (CC-by) and Attribution-ShareAlike
> > > Licences
> > > (CC-by-sa) are considered free (but not GPL-compatible) by the FSF (see
> > > http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#OtherLicenses ), while
> > > the Debian legal team concluded that they were not free.[1]
> >
> > Notes:
> > (1) Version 3.0 CC licenses *are* considered DFSG-free.
>
> I see. That's god.
>

Hmm... I though you were an atheist ;-)

       AA