[Rd] license.db Bug Report (FSF field for CC 4.0 licenses)

Trevor Davis trevor@|@d@v|@ @end|ng |rom gm@||@com
Wed Feb 2 21:05:55 CET 2022


Hi,

I noticed some errors in the `FSF` fields in `share/licenses/license.db`
for some Creative Commons licenses:

`license.db` should be corrected to:

```
Name: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License
Abbrev: CC BY-SA 2.0
FSF: free_and_GPLv3_incompatible

Name: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Abbrev: CC BY 4.0
FSF: free_and_GPLv3_compatible (
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ccby)

Name: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Abbrev: CC BY-SA 4.0
FSF: free_and_GPLv3_compatible (
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ccbysa)
```

* According to the current version of
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html the FSF considers the CC BY
4.0 license "compatible with all versions of the GNU GPL" and the CC BY-SA
4.0 license "one-way compatible with the GNU GPL version 3: this means you
may license your modified versions of CC BY-SA 4.0 materials under GNU GPL
version 3".
* Note Creative Commons explicitly declared GPL-3 a "BY-SA Compatible
License" for version 4.0 on October 8th, 2015:
https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses
* In a previous version of the FSF license website available on web
archives (e.g.
http://web.archive.org/web/20150124042152/https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OtherLicenses)
the FSF explicitly considered the earlier CC BY 2.0 and CC BY-SA 2.0
licenses incompatible with the GNU GPL licenses.

  I'm unsure whether the URL for the `FSF` field for the CC BY-SA 2.0
license should point to such a Web Archived link or simply be stripped as I
suggested above.  However the current version of
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ccbysa no longer mentions
the CC BY-SA 2.0 license nor its incompatibility with the GPL license and
hence it should be updated in some fashion.

Best,

Trevor

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