u-wallpapers include Creative Commons v2 licenses which are controversial

[Jeremy Bícha]

The Ubuntu Wallpapers for 15.10 include Creative Commons version 2 licensed photos.

https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-art-pkg/ubuntu-wallpapers/ubuntu/revision/166

This is in contrast to what was in debian/copyright up until that point and what I believe the guidelines say:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Documentation/Backgrounds

There's good reason to have version 3 of Creative Commons by the minimum standard.

It is widely believe in Debian that version 2 isn't good enough. (Version 1 is definitively believed to have not been DFSG-compatible).

See

https://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses#Creative_Commons_Attribution_Share-Alike_.28CC-BY-SA.29_v4.0

And see bug 1588938 as just one example, where Debian developers reported the issue with CC version 2 files to the GNOME developers who replaced the images in the new release.

To summarize, Creative Commons version 2 licenses should be avoided in Ubuntu because they are mostly avoided in Debian.

[Nathan Haines (nhaines)]

I'm not sure I've seen that wiki page before (or long enough ago that I've forgotten it), so thank you for that! It should be linked from the FreeCultureShowcase page for sure.

I don't mind CC-* 3.0, (I'm actually all for 4.0!) but we use Yahoo to gather photos, and Yahoo specifically references CC-BY 2.0 and CC-BY-SA 2.0, so it's not possible to get differently licensed photos that way. We could ask photographers to place an alternate license in the photo description, but I'm concerned that most submitters aren't reading the licensing guidelines in the first place before submitting. Almost all of the maintenance work each cycle during the contest is checking every entry by hand for proper licensing.

On the other hand, I have a very detailed, modular form letter explaining licenses that--to my surprise--has only been met with appreciation. So maybe we could require an explicit license. But it will probably triple the amount of work required in administering the contest.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Alberto Salvia Novella (es20490446e)]

@ Nathan Haines

The problem of having different licenses can be easily fixed by doing a thing: when you sign to the contest, you sign for publishing the content under a specific license.

[Nathan Haines (nhaines)]

No one "signs" to the contest, there's a function of Flickr groups that must be read and clicked-through before joining the group and submitting images, although it's clear that nobody actually does this, and there is no way to "sign" anything. On top of that, Flickr already gives a specific set of licenses: None, Public Domain, CC-BY v2, CC-BY-NC v2, CC-BY-SA v2, and CC-BY-NC-SA v2.

The only way we could distribute the images under a different license is if the authors stated the license in the description or something.