PPA TOS and license requirements

["Jordan Mantha" <mantha@xxxxxxxxxx>]

HI all,

We really need clarify and nail down the "acceptable licenses" part of
the PPA TOS and PPAQuickStart page. Right now the TOS has:

"You understand and agree that any content you upload to PPAs must be
freely redistributable by Canonical, and licensed under any OSI
approved license. http://opensource.org/licenses/category";

The PPAQuickStart page has:

"An APT repository of up to 1 gigabyte for material licensed with an
[WWW] OSI-approved licence."

and further down in the FAQ

"Please do not publish packages in your PPA which are not
redistributable (the basic requirement for packages in Ubuntu)."

Now, since the TOS is authoritative then the FAQ part of PPAQuickStart
is not correct.

Overall though, IMO, both statements ("OSI approved" and
"redistributable") are two extremes and neither are what is intended.
The point was that the software should be Free/Libre/Open Source
Software, unless I'm mistaken. The OSI approved license list doesn't
include important licenses such as Creative Commons that *are* used in
Ubuntu. The "redistributable" requirement says nothing towards
Freeness. This could include redistributable closed-source
applications such as you might find in the Multiverse repository.

So, it's very important to have a clear and consistent license policy
for PPAs. I'm pretty sure quite a few people have already violated the
TOS based on the "redistributable" statement.

-Jordan.