[Fwd: Debian TEI delay]

[Sebastian Rahtz]

Board/Council members may wish to consider the attached message. I think 
we have
taken our eyes off the ball with regard to licensing.

How many of those reading this would object if the copyright statetemt
on the TEI DTDs and Schemas were changed to something very similar
to what Docbook has? Which is as follows:

  Copyright 1992-2002 HaL Computer Systems, Inc.,
  O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., ArborText, Inc., Fujitsu Software
  Corporation, Norman Walsh, Sun Microsystems, Inc., and the
  Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information
  Standards (OASIS).
 
  $Id: docbookx.dtd,v 1.20 2004/01/21 18:54:21 nwalsh Exp $
 
  Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute the DocBook XML DTD
  and its accompanying documentation for any purpose and without fee
  is hereby granted in perpetuity, provided that the above copyright
  notice and this paragraph appear in all copies.  The copyright
  holders make no representation about the suitability of the DTD for
  any purpose.  It is provided "as is" without expressed or implied
  warranty.
 
  If you modify the DocBook DTD in any way, except for declaring and
  referencing additional sets of general entities and declaring
  additional notations, label your DTD as a variant of DocBook.  See
  the maintenance documentation for more information.
 
  Please direct all questions, bug reports, or suggestions for
  changes to the docbook at lists.oasis-open.org mailing list. For more
  information, see http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/.

<p>If we remove the phrase "and its accompanying documentation" to be on 
the safe side,
does this not cover us?

I for one feel quite strongly that we should let the open source philosophy
win, and not be paranoid about variants poisoning the world.

Sebastian

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Debian TEI delay
Date: 	Fri, 23 Jan 2004 23:32:26 -0500
From: 	Mark Johnson <mrj at ibiblio.org>
To: 	syd_bauman at brown.edu, sebastian.rahtz at oucs.ox.ac.uk

<p><p>Hi Guys, 

We've a bit of a snag regarding the licensing/copyright regarding the
copyright of TEI-P4. This does not prevent the TEI resources from
becoming a part of the debian distribution, It simply means that the TEI
stuff will reside in the 'non-free' part of the archivr. In other words,
most debian users will have easy access to the TEI packages.

It appears that the copyright doesn't quite meet the DSFG (Debisn Software
Free Guidelines, as spelled out
in
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s-dfsghttp://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch+-archive.html#s-dfsg

<p>I suspect that the problem arises from the copyright statement:
                                                                                         
{...] modifications to these DTDs should be performed only as specified by
  the Guidelines, for example in the chapter entitled 'Modifying the TEI
  DTD' modifications to these DTDs should be performed only as specified
by the
  Guidelines, for example in the chapter entitled 'Modifying the TEI DTD'

<p>In other words, the restraints on distibuting modified versions doesn't
qualify the TEI packags to be included in in the 'free' (aka main) part
ofthe debian archive. Put another way, the DTD packages were rejected
because they didn't meet the (DFSG) Debian software free guidelines as
spelled out
in
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s-dfsghttp://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch+-archive.html#s-dfsg

<p>(I need to look into this issue with greater detail, and will do so.

Not to worry, though: I shall soon add the TEI DTDs to the non-free portion
of the debian archive and so they should be avaikable to everyone. After
that, It'll be a simple matter to add the tei stylesheets to the acrhive.

'Just thought you'd appreciate a heads-ip on this. The bottom line being
that that I can upload the xsl stylesheet as soon as I fix the licensing
sstuff with the DYDs.

Thanks for your patience--I've wanted to get the TEI stuff into Debian for
the last three years, and I still plan on doing so.

It may take another month, but I will most defintely make TEI a pCheers,

Mark


-- 
_____________________________________
Mark Johnson        <mrj at ibiblio.org>
Debian XML/SGML     <mrj at debian.org>
Home Page:          <http://dulug.duke.edu/~mark/>
GPG fp: DBEA FA3C C46A 70B5 F120  568B 89D5 4F61 C07D E242