The Creative Commons licenses are quite popular for non-code files and
at least some of them are acknowledged to be DFSG-compatible since 3.0.
<https://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses> only explicitly lists CC-BY-SA,
but I believe at least the more permissive CC-BY is also compatible.

I think it would be helpful to add the texts for these to
/usr/share/common-licenses so that they don't have to be included in
the copyright files of multiple packages.

Please read base-files FAQ and reassign appropriately.
Thanks.

As I noted in <https://bugs.debian.org/768292#90>, one practical issue with
this is that CC-BY-3.0 and CC-BY-SA-3.0 do not actually identify a unique
license. The license files would have to be something more like
CC-BY-SA-3.0-US.

adwaita-icon-theme, the package that prompted me to open that bug,
appears to need CC-BY-SA-3.0-US, CC-BY-SA-3.0-Unported,
CC-BY-SA-2.0-IT and CC-BY-3.0-US. Thankfully, the 4.0 series of licenses
only seem to have an International version, although I don't know whether
that will remain true forever.

    S

Happy 3 years, bug!

Does anyone object to us proceeding for the 4.0 series of licenses, at
least initially?

The work needed, I think, is:

 • modify debian-policy "12.5. Copyright information" to include mention
   of CC-BY and CC-BY-SA 4.0 as suggested by base-files/FAQ
 • patches for base-files to add the license texts

So is everyone happy?

Hello Jonathan,

At least up until now, licenses haven't been added to the common
licenses list unless they are present in the archive a number of times
comparable to licenses that are already in common licenses.

There is a script in policy.git, license-count, which will help you
determine this.  It needs to be run on coccia.debian.org and it would be
helpful if you could do that before filing the bug against
debian-policy, and include the results of running the script.

Otherwise, one of the Policy Editors will probably run the script after
you've filed that bug.

See #859649 for how all this looks from Policy's point of view.

Thanks.

Thanks for the pointer. I've run it, but I had to make a minor
adjustment because it was undercounting: the DEP-5 rules are such that a
a version suffix 4.0 and 4 are equivalent. Adjusting the regexps (for CC
4.0 only. not any other licenses) results in the following. (I've added
newlines to emphasise the two CC 4.0 licenses in question)

CC-BY-SA1.0                     2
CC-BY1.0                        3
CC-BY2.0                        4
CeCILL-B                        7
CeCILL-C                        10
CC-BY2.5                        12
SILOFL1.0                       12
CC-BY-SA2.5                     15
CeCILL                          28
LaTeXPPL1.3c                    34
LaTeXPPL                        36

CC-BY4.0                        37

CC-BY-SA2.0                     45
LaTeXPPL(any)                   46
CDDL                            58

CC-BY-SA4.0                     68

GFDL(symlink)                   87
BSD(common-licenses)            102
GFDL1.3                         147
SILOFL1.1                       166
CC-BY3.0                        176
MPL2.0                          189
AGPL3                           208
Artistic2.0                     216
MPL1.1                          227
CC0-1.0                         256
CC-BY-SA3.0                     303
GFDL1.2                         320
LGPL(symlink)                   477
GFDL(any)                       547
LGPL3                           1123
GPL(symlink)                    2587
LGPL2.1                         2655
Apache2.0                       2848
GPL1                            3614
LGPL2                           3638
Artistic                        3865
LGPL(any)                       4724
GPL3                            5257
GPL2                            9833
GPL(any)                        18867


So, that's surprisingly low numbers, at least to me! I guess there'd be
resistance to adding them for this reason. Just another data point: when
I was looking at the licenses on my local system, I noticed that several
packages have the wrong license full-text in the copyright files:
they've used the human readable summaries instead of the proper text.
That's the kind of bug we could avoid if we shipped the license texts in
base-files. (I haven't exhaustively enumerated nor MBF'd these packages,
I reported just one so far against sonic-pi).

I wonder if/whether any of the CC < 4 license packages have, or could,
upgrade to CC 4, or whether the upstreams could, or have already and the
packaging hasn't caught up. More things to check...

Hello,

Patches would be welcome!

In general it does indeed seem that this not yet ready for a bug against
debian-policy.

Note that some of those will be CC-BY-SA-3.0-US, some will be CC-BY-SA-3.0
Unported, and some might be a different (legally distinct) localization
(there are many).

Some uses of Creative Commons licenses are probably on dual- or
triple-licensed content, for packages whose maintainers have assumed that
Policy requires the entire license terms to be reproduced in d/copyright,
including non-DFSG elements of a multiple-license that is DFSG-compliant
when taken as a whole (it isn't entirely clear what Policy §12.5 or
the ftp team's rules require for such licenses).

    smcv

(MR #1? Wow)

Yeah. I'll ping you again if I think I have a convincing argument around
preventing a common copyright error (if I can show it is common)

You did the MR against your own fork instead of the original project ;)
(and the salsa project is not configured to accept MRs, so I suppose
Sean means a "regular patch" in the bug).

Argh. MR #1 because it's against my own fork, and the policy package has
MR's disabled in Salsa. So instead, here it is

https://salsa.debian.org/jmtd/policy/commit/b9276e5987b003b6f12370dcfae414a51b4a8201.patch

also attached

Thanks yeah, I figured that out shortly after mailing, but I didn't save
a copy of my mail so didn't immediately reply (then replied to the
parent email instead). The GitLab auto-raise-MR-URI-in-push-message is
not as useful in practise as it seems.

Indeed. Shame! Regular patch should have arrived in the bug by now.

Hello,

Applied, thank you.

Le Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 06:41:08PM +0100, Tony Houghton a écrit :

Hello everybody,

more than 10 years later, I can only say, the more packages we have, the
the more copyright files we have that refer to the Creative Commmons
ShareAlike 3.0 or 4.0 licenses.

And importantly they are present on fairly common installations.  In
particular installing GRUB 2 triggers the presence of multiple copies
of CC-BY-SA-3.0, which is also present in mawk and libglib2.0-0t64.
The 4.0 version is also present in libglib2.0-0t64 as well as in
nftables.  Thus on a large number of non-virtual systems, adding these
two license to /usr/share/common-licenses will actually save some space.

On the other hand, I have not looked at minimal containers nor at the
most frequent packages installed on top of them, and it is possible that
many of them do not ship CC-licensed software, so their size may
increase of ~50 kiB.

Obviously, what I am trying to save is not a few kibibytes of disk
space, but the time of those who write or read debian/copyright files.
And the point I would like to make is that what matters is not just how
popular is a license but also how popular is the package that uses it.

Would you consider adding these license to /usr/share/common-licenses?

Have a nice day,

Charles

I would be in favor of adding these two licenses.