<nettime> Debian project finds Creative Commons licenses non-free

[Florian Cramer <cantsin@zedat.fu-berlin.de>]

The Debian legal team has evaluated all Creative Commons licenses and
found them non-free according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines
(DFSG) <http://www.debian.org/social_contract.html>. The DFSG are widely
considered the standard criteria of Free Software and Open Source
(since the Open Source Definition
<http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php> is based on the DFSG).

Even the Creative Commons ShareAlike license, which resembles the GPL,
and the CC Attribution license, which resembles the BSD/MIT license, are
considered non-free by Debian. The gory legal details of the explanation
can be found in
<http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/07/msg01193.html>. The
authors conclude:

   "debian-legal contributors recommend that authors who wish to create
   works compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines should not
   use any of the licenses in the Creative Commons license suite.

   Authors who use or are planning to use a Creative Commons license
   that includes the NonCommercial or NoDerivs license elements should
   understand that these restrictions are incompatible with Free
   Software.

   Authors who use or are planning to use the Attribution 2.0 license
   should consider a similar Free Software license such as a BSD- or
   MIT-style license.

   Authors who use or are planning to use the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0
   license should consider a similar Free Software license such as the
   General Public License [GPL]."

To make the Creative Commons Attribution and ShareAlike licenses free=20
by the standards of the DFSG, the authors suggest to change six points
in them. For the time being, software documentation and other works
released under Creative Commons licenses can not be part of Free
Software/Open Source operating system distributions like Debian
GNU/Linux.

-F

--=20
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/

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