[Pkg-db-devel] Bug#256332: Clarification of redistribution

[Mike Olson]

Brian,

Thanks for the follow-up.  I read the post on debian-legal, and
visited the Creative Commons discussion lists archive to see the
discussion there.  I believe that I understand the issues.

Let me be clear on Sleepycat's position:  The documentation and
the source code will be licensed in a way that permits their
inclusion in free and open source software packages.  We'll
fix this problem, but it may take me a short while to be sure
that we have the right solution.

You suggested that we could simply license the Berkeley DB
documentation under the same license as the software, but I
don't think that works.  That license talks about "the DB
software and any accompanying software that uses the DB
software."  Making that apply to documentation would require
a language change, and we're not keen to change the language
of our current license or to draft another special-purpose
license.

The best outcome, from my point of view, would be for the
Creative Commons to work with the FSF to fix the CC A-SA
license so that it's GPL-compatible, or to create a new
license that accomplishes that.  Separately, I've contacted
the CC leadership and encouraged them to follow that course.
I'll follow up with the FSF as well.

There are other solutions.  For example, there are other
licenses we could use for the documentation that are, in
your terminology, DFSG-free.  We'll look into those, too.

You should feel free to contact me on this if you have more
questions, or if you have suggestions that you think we
ought to consider.

Regards,
				mike