[tei-council] Licences

Dan O'Donnell daniel.odonnell at uleth.ca
Mon Nov 9 11:17:48 EST 2009


Hi all,

I've been having an interesting conversation with George Bina of 
Syncrosoft about TEI licencing. Apparently we use different licences for 
(for example) Vesta (GPL) and our stylesheets (LGPL). His claim is that 
this makes the stylesheets easier to incorporate in something like 
OxygenXML than it is as a commercial entity to (for example) contribute 
to the development of use cases for material in Vesta.

While I imagine the final question to licencing is a board level issue, 
the knowledge about this resides to a large extent here. Does anybody 
know if George's claim is true, why we use different licences, and have 
an opinion whether it would be a good idea to regularise them?

I don't think George will mind my excerpting the relevant bit of our 
exchange here. The context is a long running discussion between him and 
me about including more office like functionality and support for TEI 
documents within Oxygen.

> Regarding the license: no, the TEI stylesheets are available under 
> *LGPL* and not GPL, see
> http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-xsl/LICENSE
> and that allows inclusion in commercial applications.
> It is not a matter of exclusivity, it is just a matter that GPL is 
> viral, if you use GPL code then your application should also be GPL 
> and that clearly does not work for any commercial application. Vesta 
> is GPL so oXygen cannot use it unless it is available under some other 
> license that allows usage in commercial applications (BSD, MPL, Apache 
> 2.0, LGPL, etc.). 

-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell
Associate Professor of English
University of Lethbridge

Chair and CEO, Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/)
Co-Chair, Digital Initiatives Advisory Board, Medieval Academy of America
President-elect (English), Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (http://sdh-semi.org/)
Founding Director (2003-2009), Digital Medievalist Project (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/)

Vox: +1 403 329-2377
Fax: +1 403 382-7191 (non-confidental)
Home Page: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/




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