[Solved] license of files in the 2205 release -- CC BY 4.0 not mentioned anywhere?

[Johannes Schauer]

Hi,

I'm the Debian maintainer of ldraw-parts: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ldraw-parts

I saw the new Contributor's agreement moving to CC BY 4.0 which is great for Debian because the legal problems of CC BY 2.0 made ldraw-parts "non-free" as far as the Debian free software guidelines are concerned. The CC BY 4.0 license doesn't have these problems and this would mean that ldraw-parts could be included into Debian "main" instead of "non-free".

Unfortunately, as of release 2205, I do not see any mentioning of the new license in the release zip. Instead, both CAlicense.txt as well as CAreadme.txt and all "!LICENSE" headers refer to "CCAL version 2.0".

https://www.ldraw.org/legal-info also still refers to CC BY 2.0.

Will this change in a future release?

[Orion Pobursky]

There's a software update in the process of getting written. I'm targeting the 2023-01 release in January. 

That said, 2.0 will never be completely replaced since we have to get permission from all the authors. I know of at least one long contributor who has passed away and efforts to contact their estate have been fruitless. The best we can hope for is a dual licensed library.

[Johannes Schauer]

There's a software update in the process of getting written. I'm targeting the 2023-01 release in January. 

That said, 2.0 will never be completely replaced since we have to get permission from all the authors. I know of at least one long contributor who has passed away and efforts to contact their estate have been fruitless. The best we can hope for is a dual licensed library.

Thank you for the 2301 release which now adds the cc-by-4.0 license text and many files now state:

Code:

Licensed under CC BY 2.0 and CC BY 4.0

But this does mean that the files are released under both licenses, which means that the terms of both licenses apply to files marked with above line, correct? This is not actually dual licensing where the recipient of the license grant can choose which license to use as you said above, no?

As of the last release, only the files authored by PTadmin seem to be released under cc-by-4.0 only. Is this going to change in the future?

[Orion Pobursky]

Last update was the initial roll out of 4.0 so, yes, as of now all parts are dual licensed. 2023-02 (currently targeted for 4/15-4/16) will see the next phase with 4.0 only parts for those parts where all documented authors have agreed to the new license. Note that my statement above about the library never going completely 4.0 still applies.

[Max Murtazin]

Last update was the initial roll out of 4.0 so, yes, as of now all parts are dual licensed. 2023-02 (currently targeted for 4/15-4/16) will see the next phase with 4.0 only parts for those parts where all documented authors have agreed to the new license. Note that my statement above about the library never going completely 4.0 still applies.

That is due to some parts not having authors available for any reasons to re-arttribute parts. Correct?...

[Orion Pobursky]

That is due to some parts not having authors available for any reasons to re-arttribute parts. Correct?...

Yes. I know of at least one very prolific author who has passed away and whose estate we have not been able to get in contact with.

[Johannes Schauer]

Last update was the initial roll out of 4.0 so, yes, as of now all parts are dual licensed.

The term "dual licensed" that you also used in your earlier message was what threw me off because usually that term is used for software that is offered under two different licenses that the recipient of the license then can choose from (an or instead of an and). The situation with ldraw is indeed a very special one as of all 63742 software packages we ship in Debian there is not a single package that also has both CC-BY-2 and CC-BY-2. Usually, packages that are released under more than one license let the recipient choose instead of making them comply to both licenses at the same time.

An interesting legal question is, whether it's even possible to comply with both version 2 and version 4 of the CC-BY licenses at the same time but I'm sure you had legal advice on that and for me this question is only of academic but not practical interest. There are some licenses that cannot be combined with each other in that way.

2023-02 (currently targeted for 4/15-4/16) will see the next phase with 4.0 only parts for those parts where all documented authors have agreed to the new license.

That's great news, thank you! My hope is that at some point the number of 4.0-only parts is large enough such that it makes sense for me to create a part package containing only CC-BY-4.0 parts that I can then upload to the main Debian archive. Currently, due to the issues with CC-BY 2.0, ldraw still sits in the non-free archive section of Debian.

Note that my statement above about the library never going completely 4.0 still applies.

Yes, that makes a lot of sense.

Thanks a lot for your swift replies and thank you for maintaining ldraw!

[Orion Pobursky]

An interesting legal question is, whether it's even possible to comply with both version 2 and version 4 of the CC-BY licenses at the same time but I'm sure you had legal advice on that and for me this question is only of academic but not practical interest. 

I am not a lawyer and the LDraw organization doesn't have the monetary resources to hire one. That said, we're following the guidance on CC's website for the license.