[tei-council] Fwd: TEI licensing issues

[James Cummings]

On 13/09/11 21:38, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> 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".

I think I'm wanting to be a bit more open than the general 
consensus in the discussion so far.  I would characterise my 
preference as not wanting to stop any commercial or 
non-commercial (re-)use of TEI materials/software and also 
minimizing additional barriers (like needing reproduce license 
statements) in the way of people (re-)using TEI 
materials/software. I, like Piotr I think, worry about the TEI-C 
needing to endorse whether (re-)use of something is 'proper' or 
not. We don't need specific licensing to cover whether people are 
claiming the TEI-C has endorsed their product when it 
hasn't...there are existing legal solutions for that kind of thing.

I do not think that the TEI needs to force acknowledgement that 
it is being used through legal methods...to me that is a social 
problem which the community should help address by making it 
clearly the norm to badge (or otherwise describe) things as using 
TEI. If we decide attribution really is desirable, then I'm 
flexible on that, I just view it as an additional barrier to use. 
(Though only in a legal sense, not a practical sense as many 
would just ignore that requirement.)  I would actively resist 
wanting make any TEI licensing even more viral/hereditary as in 
GPL or CC+SA kinds of ways, or similarly with anything that 
limits derivative use.

For the record, I think that the choice of CC+BY+ND for jTEI, and 
specifically that an article's copyright seems to be vested in 
the TEI Consortium rather than the original authors was a 
mistake. (I would have been happier with CC+BY with copyright 
vested in the author, that would not prevent the TEI-C doing what 
it needs to do.) However, I'm assuming that the licensing of jTEI 
is off the table for the current discussions and it is just 
guidelines/other-websites/software/schemas/other-outputs that 
we're concerned with.

My two pence,
-James

-- 
Dr James Cummings, InfoDev,
Computing Services, University of Oxford