Re: PPA licenses

["Matthew East" <mdke@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 24/08/07, Celso Providelo <celso.providelo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 8/23/07, Matthew Revell <matthew.revell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Hi Matthew,
> >
> > Matthew East wrote:
> >
> > > Just starting to read the PPAQuickStart wiki page, I discovered that
> > > both on that page and in the PPA terms of service, it's necessary for
> > > one of the licenses listed on http://opensource.org/licenses/category
> > > to apply to the package.
> > >
> > > What is the position for packages which contain material which is
> > > distributed under licenses which aren't in that list but which are
> > > still free?
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > > Can anyone clarify?
> >
> > Thank you for the question. I shall raise this in today's Launchpad
> > developer meeting and get an answer for you.
>
> Hi Matthew(s),
>
> I didn't attend the devel-meeting today. How was the discussion ?

I had a look at the log: the position seems to be that the licenses
for packages which are accepted for redistribution in Ubuntu are ok,
and I presume this means packages included in Ubuntu's "main"
component only.

That satisfies me fine, because the packages I'm interested in are;
although if PPA is provided to people for more systems than Ubuntu
(Ubuntu derivatives and Debian?), this may become problematic, as I
think mpt pointed out during the meeting.

If that does give rise to problems, I wonder if it might be possible
to combine references to opensource.org with a reference to GNU
accepted free licenses [1]. That would cover the licenses I'm
interested in and hopefully most others.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SoftwareLicenses

(Note that this page says of the two free Creative Commons licenses -
"please do not use these licenses for software or documentation, since
it is incompatible with the GNU GPL and with the GNU FDL": in any case
it recognises them as free.)

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF