[Biococoa-dev] license again

[Scott Christley]

Hello all,

Well as I mentioned before, I've been working to get BioCocoa provided  
with Debian/Ubuntu automatically.  I've been working with the debian- 
med group.  Anyways, they pointed out a license issue, but I  
misunderstood the complete extent.  I thought it was just an issue  
that a couple of files had some funky licensing requirements which we  
got cleaned up, but in fact Debian considers the Creative Commons V2.5  
license to be non-free.  Now this doesn't completely prevent us from  
working with Debian, because we can be put into the non-free  
repository, but I didn't think this was the intent of BioCocoa as it  
really prevents it from being broadly distributed.

There is a newer Creative Commons V3.0 license which Debian does  
consider to be free; however, there is apparently a conflict between  
CC v3.0 and the GPL which doesn't allow them to be mixed.  What a pain  
huh?!  One of the Debian maintainers pointed me to this where Creative  
Commons themselves suggest not to use their license for software.


http://wiki.creativecommons.org/FAQ#Can_I_use_a_Creative_Commons_license_for_software.3F


So the question I have, is there a specific reason for CC v2.5?  The  
switch occurred with V2.0 before my time, so I don't know if there was  
a specific reason.  Do we have any proprietary software that is using  
BioCocoa?

I'm a GNU fan myself, so I consider the LGPL to be good, but there is  
also the BSD licenses which are very lenient.

Let me know your thoughts.

thanks
Scott