[tei-council] Fwd: TEI licensing issues

[Piotr Bański]

I've done some thinking on this now, with several versions of my
comments getting erased and rethought and rewritten, and so let me try
to reduce my comment to the bare facts, as I understand them:

On 12/09/11 18:18, James Cummings wrote:
[...]
> Currently the stylesheets take the content of <availability> for 
> the output schemas when generated by Roma. I don't think that we 
> should license the roma-output schemas differently than the ODDs 
> themselves (and not sure how we would store different licences 
> for different outputs in availability).

Case 1: Customization of external modules (trivial case: TEI
customization, this is what I assume below):

* the output schemas are a mixture of schemas and documentation coming
from the Guidelines, and present in the given ODD.

* the Guidelines are licensed under GPL

This suggests that, whatever the licensing of the ODD file is, there is
only a very restricted range of options to license the output schema,
namely to licenses compatible with the GPL.

In general, this is a picture where we may be dealing with two different
licenses: the license of the ODD itself and the license of the "external
modules". I think that in such cases, it is possible or necessary to
distinguish between the <availability> of the ODD itself, and the
<availability> of the generated schema.


Case 2: self-contained definition

* I assume license-wise transparency of the ODD engine itself.

* the resulting schema is defined solely by the ODD, and as such, it
should probably bear the same license. Uff, but...

This seems trivial, but gets complicated beyond what Knuth imagined back
in the 80's: it is obviously imaginable that the output documentation
could (should?) be distributed under a different license (e.g. with a
No-Derivatives clause). Naturally, this carries over to the first case
as well.


If the above is correct, we have two cases pointing to the need to
distinguish between i) licensing of the ODD, ii) licensing of the schema
output, and iii) licensing of the documentation.

Cringing,

  Piotr

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