[tei-council] Fwd: TEI licensing issues

[Stuart A. Yeates]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 9:38 AM, Martin Holmes <mholmes at uvic.ca> wrote:
> On 11-09-12 02:31 PM, Stuart A. Yeates wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 9:07 AM, Martin Holmes<mholmes at uvic.ca>  wrote:
>>>   >  Maybe we in the TEI could set a good example to our users by dropping
>>>   >  the dog-in-a-manger obsession
>>>   >  with controlling what people can do?
>>>
>>> I really agree with this. Your examples below mirror my thinking
>>> exactly; if anyone can make money out of TEI, then that's good for TEI;
>>> and if we (TEI) wanted to make money out of TEI with a special version
>>> of the Guidelines, then we'd be free under a CC0 or CC-BY licence to add
>>> proprietary content which is under a different licence, and release our
>>> best-selling book without fear that it could be plagiarized.
>>
>> My natural inclination is CC-BY for human-oriented stuff (guidelines,
>> source code, wiki content, etc) and CC0 for machine-oriented stuff
>> (schemas of various forms, etc).
>
> Why the distinction?

The machine-oriented stuff (i.e. schemas of various sorts, conversion
programs, etc) is essentially computational and needs to be installed
on every XML-using machine in existence so that TEI 'just works' even
for those people who have never heard of TEI or XML and have no
interest in hearing about them. To make that happen we need to take
every possible step to reduce barriers to third parties packaging
those files. Generally this stuff either works or it doesn't and when
it doesn't work there are clear error messages or examples of badness
happening; third parties can be trusted to package/distribute such
material.

The human-oriented stuff is going to be of interest to probably four
orders of magnitude less people, but it's essentially interpretive.
For interpretation, context matters. Short of full AI, we're not going
to have a program that can find errors in the textual definition of
the TEI tags. Handing this over entirely to third parties to
package/distribute entirely by themselves seems doubtful.

cheers
stuart