Bas Wijnen debian.org> writes:

Hi! Please specify the license for the DEP1 text. Is it DFSG free?

I suggested earlier [1] that DEP0 should say that all DEP's should be
licensed under a DFSG-compatible license. I recall positive comments
regarding that, but it doesn't seem DEP0 itself has changed.

Thanks,
/Simon

[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.devel.project/13595/focus=13599

On 25/05/08 at 09:12 +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:

I think that this should be adressed in DEP0, not specifically in DEP1
(i.e DEP0 should recommend something, and we will follow it in DEP1).

Zack, Dato, Lars, could you do something about that?
--
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
| jabber: lucas@nussbaum.fr GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |

to, 2008-05-29 kello 13:09 +0200, Lucas Nussbaum kirjoitti:

Yeah.

License
-------

The DEP must have a license that is DFSG free.

I've just pushed that to http://bzr.debian.org/dep/dep0/trunk/ (I didn't
think that needs any discussion; if I was wrong, it's easy enough to
revert).

I'm not sure if there's a consensus on which license to pick for all
DEPs. Comments on that are welcome.

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 01:12:51PM +0300, Lars Wirzenius wrote:

I think that DFSG free is the obvious licensing criterion we can/should
all agree. Hence I'm find with your change.

Cheers.

--
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- PhD in Computer Science ............... now what?
zack@{upsilon.cc,cs.unibo.it,debian.org} -<%%>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
(15:56:48) Zack: e la demo dema ? /\ All one has to do is hit the
(15:57:15) Bac: no, la demo scema \/ right keys at the right time

On 29/05/08 at 12:36 +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:

If you could recommend a default license, that would make future work
(like a package containing all DEPs) easier...
--
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
| jabber: lucas@nussbaum.fr GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |

to, 2008-05-29 kello 12:46 +0200, Lucas Nussbaum kirjoitti:

I'm not sure what would be the best practical license for DEPs, so I'm
hesitant to recommend one at this point. Perhaps one of the Creative
Commons ones? The current batch has some free ones, right?

We might want to recommend something BSD-like so that parts of DEPs may
easily be incorporated into other documents.

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 01:51:33PM +0300, Lars Wirzenius wrote:

If we really want to provide a default, an interesting one would be a
license which requires changing title/authorship upon changes, just to
distinguish the "official" DEP document from derivatives. I've no idea
if something free like that exists or not, but in principle it doesn't
look like that different from DFSG-free licenses requiring the
distribution in patch format (or maybe we can directly go for one of
them?).

Note that this is not a requirement, as the official DEP document will
always be available from dep.debian.net, but as a default it would make
sense.

Cheers.

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 01:51:33PM +0300, Lars Wirzenius wrote:

This talk of the licensing of DEPs is a bit of a confusion. Should
Debian look at addressing other contributions like bug reports wrt
license issues? Some governments make their work documents public
domain...

to, 2008-05-29 kello 20:53 -0400, Kevin Mark kirjoitti:

I suspect you meant to write that sentence as "I am confused by
copyright license requirements for DEPs, could someone please clarify?".
I will answer accordingly.

* DEPs are documents produced by the Debian project.
* DEPs are copyrightable works.
* DEPs will hopefully be used by Debian in a variety of ways.
* Some of those ways require copying parts of DEPs into other documents.
* For example, the Policy Manual or Developer's Reference.
* Other ways of using DEPs may mean that they should be part of main.
* For example, in /usr/share/doc for the affected packages.
* Therefore, DEPs must have a copyright license Debian considers free.
* Even without the above, Debian cannot morally accept non-free DEPs.
* Any copyright license that Debian considers free is good enough.
* It's easier if all or most DEPs have the same license.
* Thus, it would be nice to recommend one to be used by default.
* It is not necessary for all DEPs to have the same license.

About patents:

Lars Wirzenius writes:

The problem with allowing any DFSG free license is that it may mean that
the license for DEPx may be incompatible with DEPy. If a DEPz wants to
combine, or just re-use portions of, DEPx and DEPy, the license of DEPz
will be quite complex.

I believe it would lead to less problems to require that all DEPs are
licensed under a liberal and widely compatible license, such as the
Expat, X11 or the modified BSD license.