Re: [Fsfe-uk] ESF Solidarity Village report

[MJ Ray]

Tom, thanks for the report. I'll reply a bit out-of-order.

On 2004-10-17 23:56:53 +0100 Tom Chance <address@hidden> wrote:

> contact details of one of their people, if it's wanted. Otherwise 
> have a look 
> at http://lets.net

Maybe you should send this to frontdesk? I'm a little sceptical, as a 
LETS near me collapsed.

People who don't want another mention of copyright licence bugs or the 
firefox trademark, you can skip to the next message now.



Now they've gone:

> [...] About all that came of it was RMS criticising Debian for 
> nitpicking 
> re: Creative Commons licenses (he has no problem with requiring 
> attribution).

Nor does Debian! This is not about requiring attribution. Quite the 
reverse. It's about requiring no mention of the licensor at all.

I think the problem he might be referring to is forced removal of 
non-attribution mentions of the original authors. That is a problem, 
especially for things like encyclopedias or historical accounts, as it 
can blow big factual holes in the work and make it useless. Or maybe 
he's referring to the "any other comparable authorship credit" 
lawyerbomb (a term that looks like lawyers could have very long 
courtroom arguments about it).

The anti-DURT (Digital Use Restriction Technology) clause in CC-* 2.0 
is very vague too, which could hurt secure systems. I'm not surprised 
if RMS doesn't think that's a problem, as the FDL has a vague one too.

Finally, there's the practical problem where licensors include the 
"not a part of the licence but it only says that in the HTML source 
code" CC trademark terms as a licence clause.

All of these are things that some debian developers are worried about. 
See http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary.html for someone else's 
view. The "you must remove all references to me even if they're 
factually accurate" clause is far beyond "nitpick".

> [...] Oh, and the only bit of Free 
> Software we saw was the icon for Mozilla Firefox on someone's Win98 
> icon bar!

The Mozilla Firefox fox-on-globe is restricted using trademark law. 
Are you sure that was a free software icon you saw? ;-)

--
MJR/slef    My Opinion Only and not of any group I know
 Creative copyleft computing - http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
Speaking at ESF on Sat 16 Oct - http://www.affs.org.uk/