Re: PPA TOS and license requirements

[Caroline Ford <caroline.ford.work@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It is only free creative commons licensing that we should accept:

CC PD (which is just PD)
CC-BY
CC-BY-SA

We shouldn't allow anything with -NC (non commercial) or -ND (no
derivatives). It could be argued that -NC and -ND are redistributable
(unmodified, by Ubuntu) - however they are non-free as people can't
modify them and/or sell things containing them.

"licensed under a licenses permitting redistribution free of charge"
seems to have the wrong meaning of free and is a bit of a basic error
for a linux distro to be making..

caroline

On Sat, 2007-09-29 at 00:24 -0600, Neal McBurnett wrote:
> 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 "Please do not publish packages in your PPA which are not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/