Re: PPA licenses

["Jordan Mantha" <mantha@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 8/24/07, Caroline Ford <caroline.ford.work@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-08-24 at 10:45 +0100, Matthew Revell wrote:
>
> >
> > > 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
>
> Not allowing Creative Commons BY-SA seems realy backwards. I'd
> certainly not allow -NC or -ND as they are non free.
>
> Wikipedia uses the GFDL and many other open content projects use
> CC-BY-SA. Missing these out makes it looks like you don't understand
> open content licensing.
>

While I personally agree with you, Debian does not consider CC-BY-SA
to be a DFSG-free license and barely considers GFDL free (not
accepting invariant sections, which makes significant amounts of GNU
documentation non-free).

To the bigger issue, I don't see how it is possible for Launchpad to
ensure license conformity. My experience in MOTU tells me that a lot
code out there is not what what it seems (claiming GPL is not the same
as being GPL) or contains files with several different licenses or no
license at all. On top of that there are so many different licenses
out there, I really don't see how Launchpad can adequately review
everything that is uploaded to a PPA. Certainly it can be encouraged
and some policy for removal in place (I'll bet it takes less than 1
week for somebody to upload a w32codecs package), but as to actively
enforcing licenses, is that really something that is planned?

-Jordan