Re: PPA TOS and license requirements

[Neal McBurnett <neal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Sep 19, 2007 at 03:48:14PM -0600, Joey Stanford wrote:
> Good points.  I'll take this one on.
>
> On 9/19/07, Jordan Mantha <mantha@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 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 "Please do not publish packages in your PPA which are not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.

So https://help.launchpad.net/PPATermsofUse  now says that:

> You understand and agree that any content you upload to PPAs must be
> freely redistributable by Canonical, and licensed under a licenses
> permitting redistribution free of charge. Acceptable licenses
> include licenses approved by:
>    * OSI
>    * FSF
>    * DFSG
>    * CC

Is the intent to allow use of Creative Commons licenses like
"Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd)"?

 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

I didn't think folks were arguing for support of _all_ CC licenses,
and I saw this comment in the discussion, which I agree with:

On Fri, Aug 24, 2007 at 02:02:20PM +0100, Caroline Ford wrote:
> Not allowing Creative Commons BY-SA seems really backwards. I'd
> certainly not allow -NC or -ND as they are non free.

Furthermore note that there are CC licenses which would actually
prohibit Canonical from redistributing, like the Developing Nations
one:

 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/devnations/2.0/

It is "retired" now, but I think the PPA ToS should be very specific
in which CC licenses are allowed, and choose them so that folks who
upload or download from PPAs aren't surprised or put in difficult
positions.

Neal McBurnett                 http://mcburnett.org/neal/