[tei-council] TEI Licensing

[Lou Burnard]

I wish the wiki page distinguished between

a) the ODD source of the Guidelines

b) the official (HTML) generated form of the Guidelines

Maybe this would confuse things even further, but they do seem rather 
different animals. For many people, the ODDs really are quite similar to 
source code (as I would argue they are). For most people the HTML text 
of the Guidelines most definitely is not.


On 29/09/11 10:37, James Cummings wrote:
> On 29/09/11 05:20, John Unsworth wrote:
>> And for what it's
>> worth, I think there should be one licensing scheme for all
>> the TEI IP.  I'd favor LGPL.  Creative Commons seems more
>> oriented to content, and  I think our core product is actually
>> software--because it's all ODD-driven--but that's a
>> conversation we should have.
>
> Hi John,
>
> I think this is partly where we have some disagreement. As you
> can see by:
>
> http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/Council-licensing
>
> I think the Stylesheets, Roma, TEIOO, and Vesta are 'Software'.
> I think the Guidelines, the Sample ODDs, the pre-generated or
> roma-generated schemas, the wiki, the TEI-C Website, and TEI CSS
> are 'Not Software'.
>
> I believe I understand the argument of ODD as both documentation
> and literate programming of meta-schema and certainly have some
> sympathies to that point of view. However, I do not believe that
> the majority of the TEI community would view a schema (or
> meta-schema) by itself is 'Software' in the watered-down sense
> that is most common today.  If faced with a choice between the
> oXygen editor, a generated schema, and an ODD, I would bet that
> most people would say oXygen is the software, and the generated
> schema and ODD are associated data of some sort. At the most base
> level I think the community would view software as something that
> 'does something' and schemas and ODDs as additional data that
> helps them do that but is not essential to functioning. (i.e.
> they are even less software than say a required library for a
> program).
>
> I recognise putting the stylesheets (and TEIOO because that is
> just packaged stylesheets) is debatable.  They do not *do*
> anything by themselves, they need an XSLT interpreter in order to
> do anything. However, I think this differentiation would be
> splitting hairs and that the TEI community would class the TEI-C
> Stylesheets as 'Software'.
>
> If these things are 'Not Software' that does not necessarily make
> them 'Content' but I would argue that the Guidelines on the web,
> other website material, and the wiki are things hat the majority
> of the community would count as 'Content'. The Sample ODDs and
> (pre-)generated schemas I admit are debatable, but for the
> reasons outlined above I think I'd consider them associated
> data/content more than Software.
>
> In terms of Licensing, I'm fine with LGPL for things we decide
> are software and would favour CC0 or CC+BY for those things we
> consider something else. In general reducing the number of
> barriers for use and re-use would be my aim because I think it is
> in the best interest of the Consortium and the community.
>
> Just my two pence,
>
> -James