On 2011-02-18 08:57:37 (+0100), jdd
Le 18/02/2011 01:59, Pascal Bleser a écrit :
Right, but the fact that the licenses are adapted to each country's copyright laws is even more interesting.
I don't see how this can work for an international project (that is world wide readable web site). What doeas "adaptation" mean? do any author have to read the variant for any country his text is used?, In such case, even cc recomends the unvariant one. and the language have little meaning, several countries using the same langage.
Well that's *precisely* the problem: as of today, and as far as I know (IANAL), there are no clear rules nor all that much jurisprudence on how such things are handled. Say that I, citizien of Belgium, acting under Belgian law, make some content. In that case the content I produced is protected de-facto by the copyright and intellectual property / ownership laws that apply to Belgium. Always. In any case. Never mind the license it is under, some of those laws always apply. Then there is the framework of the license that applies to my content, which gives permissions to people to use it. In case of abuse, AFAIK, no one knows what really happens. Jurisprudence in a few cases such as Google's newspaper case, seem to suggest that it would rather be the copyright law framework of the country where the *complaint* is filed in court. Or, rather, where the content was created. Another possibility is that you would have to file the complaint in the country of the person or organization that infringes your copyright. And, in that latter case, it is even more interesting that the CC license has been adapted to several countries. To the extent of my knowledge, there is no such thing as an "international law", or an "international copyright". The companies that actually do trademark stuff "internationally" must take care of doing so in every single country. Of course, except for a few rogue countries such as China, where the government just doesn't bother, or Russia to some extent, copyright laws have many things in common in all countries.
things are différent, if, for example, you do photos in germany for a german news paper. all is done in only one country.
I personally don't see any philosophical (dude, don't be so French ;)) issue here.
no french at all (I'm not part of the "révolution des frites" :-). did you ever met RMS? the problem is also *the reputation* of openSUSE on the free sotware/opensourse world. I regret often some kind of thiking in this world (see the controversy Novell<->Microsoft), but we have to live with.
Yes, that's what I meant with "being so French", please stop the mental masturbation process. Yes, I've met RMS on several occasions in person, in real life, and if you had you might have a different take on this as well. While I am as much for the GPL as anyone else on the project, let's not make this ideologic, but pragmatic. What do we *want*, and what is the best way to *achieve* that. In this case: which license is * best adapted to what we want to protect and what we want people to be able to do with it (commercially and non-commercially) * best suited for being enforced in a legal framework
For RMS and many free software user, the problem is *first* philosophical (and this makes it even more difficult). In LUG meetings I'm often asked "are you for the free software or for the open source software? I have to say I'm for both, but this leads to discussions :-)
You confuse philosophical with extremism. Well, then have the discussion and educate them. Oh, and tell them to *contribute* something first before going into the philosphical debates and making grand stands about what is right and what is wrong, especially when calling the thousands of actual contributors of opensource projects "bad" or "wrong". Yes, I know those people.
Point 1 is debatable (IMHO: "no" for text content, "yes" for artwork.)
why? If anybody could sell a hardcopy of the openSUSE web site I would be very glad (not that this have any chance to happen anytime soon :-))
True, but that's why I said "debatable". It's to discuss.
CC licenses make it indeed very easy to pick a variant from the two questions above, and are also a *lot* easier to understand.
* and it's very easy to pick a non free one (when there is no non free GPL :-)
There are no "non-free" CC licenses, except when you leave out "ShareAlike".
* the simplicity is simply a fake. The CC summary *have no value at all*, as have no value the preambule of the GPL. Only the full text have value and if you don't read it, you don't know what you sign for.
It's not a fake. There are two things in a license: * people who want to use your work must and want to *understand* it, and the GFDL is just as confusing and complex as the GPL * the complete license, if it needs to be enforced
And CC is evolving also.
Yes, which is why it has different versions, just like the GFDL.
Alas the licence problem can't be easy!
I don't think anyone said it's easy.
When one see "GPL" or "GFDL", he mostly know what it's about: copyleft, viral licence (derived work must have the same licence). When somebody see the CC licence he is obliged to go to the cc site to know what variant it is (who ever learn the meaning of several two letters logo?)
Sorry, but I highly disagree here, the CC licenses are much easier to understand. When you go to the CC website where each license variant is explained, it very clearly lists what may and what may not be done with it. Example: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ It really cannot be any simpler than that.
We actually *want* people to reuse what we do, at the very least as far as marketing and artwork material goes.
if so, makes the content completely free, without any limitation. wiki can't use attribution (who knows who is the author?), and SA (share alike) have also little meaning on an wiki.
There is no "completely free", you always have to pick a license. "Public Domain" is not applicable in every country: as an example, it doesn't have any real legal existance in Germany or Belgium. The history defines who the author is. SA doesn't have "little meaning", it's the same as the "viral" part of the GPL/GFDL. [...]
We probably have to let this apart for some time (I don't see any emergency), build the foundation that could at least give us some entity to own the rights :-). Then have a large discussion and a vote, may be, to choose the licence to be used. In fact probably:
I don't see why we couldn't at least have a discussion right now, and collect information already.
* what licence we will have for any "official" openSUSE product;
Define "official openSUSE product".
* what licences (notice the "s") are usable for work done in our name ("you can use the openSUSE name if your work uses one of the following licences...")
That's a different topic, because trademarks play a role here too.
* what licences make a product accepted in the OSS repo, in the non-OSS, completely refused...
That's already defined since a long time... (any OSI compliant
license).
And the topic, here, is the content on the wiki (and probably
also on OWN and planet).
--
-o) Pascal Bleser