[tei-council] Fwd: TEI licensing issues

[Stuart A. Yeates]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 8:38 AM, Sebastian Rahtz
<sebastian.rahtz at oucs.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> On 13 Sep 2011, at 21:18, Martin Holmes wrote.
>>
>> I'd be very interested to know why they advised GPL over BSD -- did they
>> give any reasoning? It would be good to know whether those reasons are
>> still relevant.
>
> the brief  from the TEIC was that they wanted protection against
> the thing being taken up and commercialized, so we (OSS Watch)
> recommended GPL as the best protection, of the licenses available
> at that time. The familiar arguments which Piotr has just rehearsed.
>
> That was, I think, 9 years ago (I could be wrong); OSS Watch started in 2003,
> and this was in our early days. Were you there when it was discussed, Stuart?
>
> People like OSS watch can advise us of the best license _if_ we
> have a clear idea about what we want to achieve. They cant advise us
> on BSD vs GPL, cos "it all depends".

My recollection of the discussion (I think I wasn't there for the
entire thing?) is mainly that it focused on code not the guidelines,
which seemed odd at the time because the guidelines were clearly the
heart of the business of the TEI. That may have been because OSS Watch
was more focused on code not text at that time, or because licensing
for data was not as advanced then as it is now or because of the way
the question was asked.

cheers
stuart