[tei-council] Fwd: [tei-board] licensing issues

Wed Sep 28 12:21:47 EDT 2011

On 11-09-28 08:32 AM, Lou Burnard wrote:
> I'm all in favour of simplicity, and disentangling what ODD deliberately
> tangles surely cannot be a good idea. But all the more reason to insist
> on  precision as to what we are claiming or not claiming.
>
> Just as a wild hypothesis, suppose some other international agency  were
> to produce something called a "standard for linguistic annotation"
> consisting of a whole bunch of recommendations for encoding things in
> XML, using identical gis and content models clearly derived from the
> TEI, though perhaps with some minor modifications, but which made
> absolutely no reference to or acknowledgment of the fact Would this
> licence (note spelling) enable us to sue their bottoms off?

Given that the TEI has so little income, and is even contemplating 
having less or none at all, the fact is that we're never going to sue 
anyone, ever. But the main point of permissive licensing is that there's 
no reason for anyone to need to steal our stuff; they can take it and do 
what they like with it, and good luck to them. If someone creates a 
standard which is pretty much like TEI but a bit different, and it 
becomes successful, then what we have is really a fork. Even if they 
didn't acknowledge the source of their work (and why would they not?), 
it would be obvious to everyone and widely commented on. The most likely 
reason for a fork is that the TEI becomes perceived as being inflexible 
and unresponsive, or going in the wrong direction; in which case a fork 
is not a bad thing.

This is the sort of thing that happened with HTML5, and after some years 
of negotiation, it looks as though the forkers and the W3C are coming to 
an accommodation which should give us one new standard instead of several.

Cheers,
Martin

>
> (This is of course a purely nuts-and-port speculation as Piotr and
> Laurent will agree.)
>
>
>
>
> On 28/09/11 16:08, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>> I am with Martin here. A very simple license across the board seems the only sustainable way forward.
>>
>> Sent from my iPad
>>
>> On 28 Sep 2011, at 16:07, "Martin Holmes"<mholmes at uvic.ca>   wrote:
>>
>>> I must admit I don't really understand the reasoning here. Schemas can
>>> be derived from ODDs, and ODDs (presumably) from schemas; documentation
>>> is tied directly into schemas by the generation process, and the
>>> Guidelines consist of documentation knitted together with explanatory
>>> prose. The whole seems to me to be inextricably tangled, which is as it
>>> should be, and I see no reason why some parts should be licensed
>>> differently from others.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Martin
>>>
>>> On 11-09-28 07:03 AM, Piotr Bański wrote:
>>>> In general, I believe that a single license for code, schemas and their
>>>> documentation would be a real blunder. Documentation under LGPL? Please...
>>>>
>>>> I attempted to present my reasoning in this e-mail:
>>>>
>>>> http://lists.village.virginia.edu/pipermail/tei-council/2011/013670.html
>>>>
>>>> It may be stupid, of course, but I'd rather shove it in front of your
>>>> eyes now and wait to be told so than have a feeling that we may be
>>>> missing something important.
>>>>
>>>> best,
>>>>
>>>>     P.
>>>>
>>>> On 28/09/11 15:34, Laurent Romary wrote:
>>>>> You guys are always so quick.... I was stuck in the middle of the river not understanding why CC-By, which is what is aimed at with BSD is incompatible with GPL (in a context where we seem not to care about GPL). Should not we make a recommendation along principles and make explicit that CC-BY and BSD are two options, and let the board finalize. Or should we vote on one or the other?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Le 28 sept. 2011 à 14:55, Martin Holmes a écrit :
>>>>>
>>>>>> So this is the proposal:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The TEI Guidelines, including schemas or documentation generated from
>>>>>> them, associated processing tools and stylesheets, exemplars, and test
>>>>>> files, should be released under a 2-clause BSD license.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> (The 2-clause license is the "Simplified BSD License" or "FreeBSD License".)
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I vote in favour.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Cheers,
>>>>>> Martin
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On 11-09-28 05:25 AM, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On 28 Sep 2011, at 13:12, Lou Burnard wrote:
>>>>>>>>> so which of you three were going to convey this to Council, I wonder? never mind.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> I'm not sure who "you three" are, but I'm guessing it's Laurent's job
>>>>>>>> formally to convey Board decisions to the Council
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> the chair of the Board also sits, ex officio, on the Council.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> "all TEI stuff which the Consortium produces" is a rather vague concept.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> it is. sorry
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> In particular it cannot apply prospectively surely? If (perhaps as a
>>>>>>>> result of the ongoing futures debate) the Consortium gets into some
>>>>>>>> other line of business -- say developing courseware -- it might want to
>>>>>>>> licence such activities differently.
>>>>>>> true.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> s/TEI stuff/The TEI Guidelines, including schemas or documentation generated from them, associated processing tools and stylesheets, exemplars, and test files/
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> I think the proposal needs to be rather more precisely formulated before
>>>>>>>> it can be voted on,
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> see above. is there a category you have in mind to _exclude_, apart from courseware?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>> Stormageddon Rahtz
>>>>>>> Head of Information and Support Group
>>>>>>> Oxford University Computing Services
>>>>>>> 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Sólo le pido a Dios
>>>>>>> que el futuro no me sea indiferente
>>>>>>>
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>>>>>>>
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>>>>>
>>>>> Laurent Romary
>>>>> INRIA&    HUB-IDSL
>>>>> laurent.romary at inria.fr
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Martin Holmes
>>> University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
>>> (mholmes at uvic.ca)
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-- 
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
(mholmes at uvic.ca)