support creative commons licenses explicitly

Hi,

When we added the project licensing section we explicitly left off CC based on the recommendation found on the gnu.org site which says "Please don't use it for software or documentation, since it is incompatible with the GNU GPL and with the GNU FDL."

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OtherLicenses

If someone can argue the merits of including this, I'd be happy to get someone to work on this.

I will point out this announcement though....

http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2008/07/23/creative-common-24.html

I should also add that currently LP tracks a project license which does not distinguish between code and content (except with translations). So it's not an easy fix to just add a CC field.

However, if you want to use CC you can simply add the CC license in the Open Source/Other field.

Why should we care about being compatible with the GPL?
AFAICT, the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ ) complies with the requirements listed in the licensing policy ( http://www.ubuntu.com/community/ubuntustory/licensing) .

Moreover, the GPL recommendation say that we should not use CC for software, but it's OK to use it for educational works. I have two projects that deal with educational work, and I would like to use a CC license for them without waiting months for a Launchpad administrator review.

Hmm this has been bugging me today. We do allow PPA's with a CC license so perhaps we should change the project page.

https://help.launchpad.net/PPATermsofUse

See bug #333932, which is about redoing the license-choice UI; Curtis says he intends to address it using the guided workflow for new project creation.

Even though this bug precedes that one, I think maybe this one should be resolved as a dup of the later one (which does address the CC issue explicitly, among other things).

Bug #333932 is not a duplicated of this one. The later bug is talking about the UI for license selection. It could be closed once the UI is changed even if CC licenses are not included in the new list. If there is a way to link the bugs without making them duplicates, that makes sense; however, solving #333932 does not automatically close this bug as well.

Bug #333932 includes the CC license question among other things. The question now is not whether to allow the free CC licenses (that's been decided positively, as bug #333932 indicates), but how to present them in the UI, since there are so many licenses to deal with. IOW, that bug is not just about UI. (In fact, it was originally motivated by the CC license question -- read the beginning of its description.)

I would like to include the most popular free combinations of the licenses. I think this should be included in the 2.2.4 cycle to update project registration.

For what it's worth, I should point out that the current workaround of "select 'Other/Open Source'" and specifying "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (Unported)" in the "Description of additional licenses" field has apparently caused the Awn Extras project to be incorrectly marked as a proprietary project. (For details, see linked question.)

I'm re-targeting this bug for just the db/enum work to add the new CC licenses. Bug 333932 then will track just the ui changes to expose those new licenses to projects. These two bugs (and their respective branches) will land in different cycles, but the database/enum changes must happen first.

At Barry's request, the complete list of CC license that are "open source" for Launchpad's purposes:

  - CC-BY (the "Attribution" license)
  - CC-BY-SA (the "Attribution - ShareAlike" license)
  - CC-0 (that's a zero, not a letter O... CC-0 is meant to be like public domain, for jurisdictions that don't have public domain)

The above refers to both the "unported" (non-country-specific) versions of those licenses, and to the various country-specific versions. I.e., "CC-BY-SA Australia 3.0" would be fine.

Just to be completely clear: none of the NC ("non-commercial") or ND ("no-derivatives") CC licenses are open-source. If a project wants to use those variants, they'll have to arrange proprietary hosting with us.

For reference: an overview of CC licenses is at http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses .

I believe PD, not CC-0 is public domain. That is to say, if you do not say "Public Domain", it is not public domain. We already have public domain. I do not think we need CC-0

There exist places on this earth where there is no Public Domain. But CC-0 is valid everywhere.

Curtis Hovey <email address hidden> writes:
> I believe PD, not CC-0 is public domain. That is to say, if you do not
> say "Public Domain", it is not public domain. We already have public
> domain. I do not think we need CC-0

I agree we don't need to directly support CC-0.

AIUI, that "license" is basically for jurisdictions that don't have a
public domain, or for which it is not easy to put something into the
public domain -- surprisingly, there are quite a few of those. However,
it's fine for us to just use PD; that captures the author's intent, and
if they want to include a COPYING file that has the CC-0 text, they can.

-K

Fixed released in Launchpad 2.2.6.