CC NC licences not DFSG Free

[Stefano Rivera]

Hi, not sure if you saw http://bugs.debian.org/618876

I'm pretty sure CC's NC licences aren't sufficiently free for Debian main or Ubuntu universe.

Is that material not available under a freer licence?

[Julien Lavergne (gilir)]

As far as I know, this is the state of this problem :

screenlets (core) is no more affected by this. However, most of the images files don't have a clear licence, but was made by this upstream project. It probably can be licenced under the same licence than the source code

indiv-screenlets should use Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike instead of the NC. I think it was, in fact, always the case, but there was a mistake in debian/copyright and in the licence use in the source (which was propably maintained by the same person ... me :-/). A grep-r doesn't show any icon with a NC licence.

[Stefano Rivera (stefanor)]

I see a statement in LICENCE in screenlets, that seems like it's affected. I don't think it was *just* your error when drawing up debian/copyright.

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~screenlets-dev/screenlets/trunk/view/head:/LICENCE

[Märt Põder (boamaod)]

I am sorry, the license was not updated on time and should be okay now.

When the Screenlets core framework and actual widget applications were put into separate projects, the license changed. Now the Screenlets project hardly contains any artwork and couple of icons used are licensed by CC BY-SA 3.0 which is DFSG-compatible. Updated license file is committed to the project and can be accessed at http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~screenlets-dev/screenlets/trunk/view/head:/LICENSE

However, we recommend to distribute screenlets together with example screenlets from indiv-screenlets project. By now recommended example package for distribution is screenlets-pack-basic (for example, see https://launchpad.net/~screenlets-dev/+archive/ppa/+files/screenlets-pack-basic_0.0.3%7Ebzr1010%2B20110727221347%7Eoneiric1_all.deb), which may not be fully DFSG-compatible as licenses for bunch of files are unknown (Lyrics and Nowplaying are the problematic ones as it seems). Please notice, that these problems do not affect distribution of Screenlets core in any way and it is functional without actual example screenlets.

For example screenlets I suggest that we either: (1) remove the screenlets with problematic licenses from basic pack or (2) create a separate DFSG compatible package with only explicitly clear DFSG-compatible licenses. Can you recommend which is the best way to satisfy the DFSG requirements?

[Julien Lavergne (gilir)]

Thanks for the detailled explanation.
For a Debian point of view, if you include non-DFSG files, we need to re-create the tarball to exclude them. It's not enough to move them to a screenlets-pack-* package, it should be exclude from the indiv-screenlets-*.tar.gz

At least, we need a way to identify them easily (like a note on the README file). For safety, I'll suggest to just remove them from the source, because non DFSG free mean for most of the cases, non free code. So for an upstream point of view, it could be safe to remove them, unless you consider it's still free code.

[Märt Põder (boamaod)]

Individual Screenlets project will continue to contain any reasonable licenses and these not have to be DFSG licenses. However, screenlets in /src which are included in Basic Pack are with DFSG compatible licenses. List of these DFSG guaranteed screenlets can be found at http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~indiv-screenlets-dev/indiv-screenlets/trunk/view/head:/setup.py#L105. Note that this doesn't mean that there aren't more DFSG compatible screenlets in Individual Screenlets project besides these.