Debian and keyboard mapping copyrights

[Distributions] Posted Mar 18, 2009 15:16 UTC (Wed) by corbet

The debian-legal list often serves as an early warning system for interesting copyright issues. Currently, the project is discussing the fate of a French Dvorak keyboard mapping which is evidently subject to a copyright claim by one Francis Leboutte, who says it can only be used under a Creative commons noncommercial, no-derivatives license. That license, being non-free, would exclude the this keyboard mapping (which is implemented entirely in free software) from the Debian distribution. But there is a clear question here: can a keyboard layout be copyrighted at all? Click below for the debian-legal discussion; this issue has also come up in the freedesktop.org bug tracker.

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