[liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: New License Proposal
- From: Eitan Isaacson <eitan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:59:50 -0800
Hi John.
Yeah, each license has it's twists for sure. And you are right to point
out all of the legal difficulties and ambiguities that follow GPL,
especially in dynamically linked libraries. Nonetheless, software
distributors have adapted, and do a good job at dealing with those
handful of diverse open source licenses. The length of the thread in
debian-legal is a testament to how dodgy these issues could become.
Imagine that kind of discussion for every piece of software they want to
include!
What they meant by the "desert island test" is that liblouis restricts
the user in a way that is unreasonable according to the Debian social
contract. Specifically liblouis's current terms dictate that if a user
creates a table for her personal use, she is obligated to distribute the
table freely. But what if she were on a desert island, and didn't have
internet connectivity? I assume this was not your intention, but to
restrict commercial vendors from creating proprietary tables that would
abusively take advantage of our lovely free software, without
contributing anything back. I guess this isn't apparent from the
restriction's language.
I am no authority around these legal manners, and I might be naive, but
I believe that as liblouis's user-base grows so will it's momentum as a
free translator and the collection of bundled tables will grow too. For
example Orca today is localized for 56 languages, and has a very vocal
user community who contribute in many different ways. I think wide
adoption of liblouis will help establish liblouis as a free translator
better than any restriction ever could.
As a "Linux-person", I have a lot of faith in the free software culture.
I believe that liblouis will benefit a lot from this, more than any
possible abuse of it's freeness.
Cheers,
Eitan.
On Wed, 2008-03-05 at 21:45 -0800, John Gardner wrote:
> Hello Eitan. Seems strange to me that you are proposing that liblouis
> follow a "standard" license, since there seem to be few such things. I
> seldom read a license for software that is simple or that agrees 100% with
> some other. I am no legal whiz, but GPL has always seemed weird to me. It
> is ambiguous on the subject of whether a GPL application can be a linked
> library to a non-GPL application, although the free software proponents seem
> to believe otherwise. I haven't read the most recent GPL license revision,
> so maybe it is more explicit. The LGPL seems a lot more clear, and I have
> no problems with LGPL. However since liblouis was derived from BRLTTY, we
> had no choice but to use GPL, but we wanted to clarify it and added those
> extra terms. The BRLTTY folks agreed to permit that.
>
> I never even heard of a desert island test, and frankly I just got tired of
> trying to follow that archive you referenced. Talk about unfriendly to
> blind users! At any rate there seem to be disagreements about the relevance
> of this particular test. I guess I don't understand what they mean by
> "free". People who distribute software can make whatever damned rule they
> want, and they seem to have excluded liblouis from their distributions
> because Oregon isn't a desert I suppose. I have no idea what importance
> this exclusion means in practice (please explain to a non-Linux person), but
> I am not willing to alter the third liblouis license provision to language
> that is fuzzy or that doesn't accomplish the goal we set at the beginning.
>
> John Gardner
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: liblouis-liblouisxml-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:liblouis-liblouisxml-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Eitan
> Isaacson
> Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2008 8:59 PM
> To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: New License Proposal
>
> Hi John Gardner.
>
> I am an Orca developer and I have great interest in seeing liblouis
> distributed side by side with Orca on a plethora of free platforms and
> distributions. I don't personally have a great grasp of all the legal
> matters at hand, but I know that license compatibility is an important thing
> in the free software world, so I would advocate for any standard Open Source
> license, I think most of them do a good job at protecting both the creators
> and the users, and help keep the licensed software free.
>
> I recently sent out a mail to the Debian legal team to get their advice, I
> believed I copied you on it. The entire thread could be found here:
> http://www.nabble.com/Questions-about-liblouis-to15701903.html
>
> Since the tables that are distributed today in liblouis are already GPL, any
> derivative of those tables is guaranteed to be free.
>
> Cheers,
> Eitan.
>
> On Wed, 2008-03-05 at 19:33 -0800, John Gardner wrote:
> > John, I will not agree to make the braille tables voluntary
> > contributions to the archive. A braille translator is useless without
> braille tables.
> > ViewPlus has supported development of liblouis because we thought that
> > a worldwide open source braille translator would reduce costs and
> > improve quality of braille for everybody. It will not achieve this
> > goal if people who develop tables keep them proprietary.
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: liblouis-liblouisxml-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > [mailto:liblouis-liblouisxml-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John J.
> > Boyer
> > Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2008 6:44 PM
> > To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > Subject: [liblouis-liblouisxml] New License Proposal
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > We probably all want liblouis and liblouisxml to have as few
> > restrictions on its use and on contributing to it as possible. A few
> > days ago I sent a message about switching to the LGPL licnse from GPL.
> > However, the license that I would really like the software to have is
> > the one used for libxml2, on which liblouisxml depedds heavily. This
> > is in turn an adaptation of the MIT license. I have in turn modified
> > the license to meet the need to make liblouind liblouisxml as widely
> available as possible.
> > Adoption of the license is of course contengent on the approval of the
> > BRLTTY team. The license is presented below.
> >
> > --------------------
> >
> > Copyright (C) 2003-2008
> > ViewPlus Technologies, Inc.
> > and
> > JJB Software, Inc.
> >
> > The copyright holders acknowledge their debt to the BRLTTY screen
> > reader for the original source code. This license is approved by the
> > BRLTTY team and has NO EFFECT on the licensing of their software.
> >
> > All Rights Reserved.
> >
> > Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
> > a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
> > "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
> > without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
> > distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
> > permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the
> following conditions:
> >
> > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
> > included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
> >
> > THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
> > EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
> > MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
> > IN NO EVENT SHALL THE DANIEL VEILLARD BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES
> > OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR
> > OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR
> > THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
> >
> > Except as contained in this notice, neither the name of ViewPlus
> > Technologies Inc. nor JJB Software, Inc. shall be used in advertising
> > or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in this
> > Software without prior written authorization from them.
> >
> > Persons using or dealing in this software are urged to publish any
> > braille translation tables or semantic-action files which they may
> > develop, so as to assist others who may wish to use this software.
> > This is a non-binding request.
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > John J. boyer; President, Chief Software Developer JJB Software, Inc.
> > http://www.jjb-software.com
> > Madison, WI USA
> > Developing software for people with disabilities
> >
> > For a description of the software and to download it go to
> > http://www.jjb-software.com
> >
> > For a description of the software and to download it go to
> > http://www.jjb-software.com
>
> For a description of the software and to download it go to
> http://www.jjb-software.com
>
> For a description of the software and to download it go to
> http://www.jjb-software.com
For a description of the software and to download it go to
http://www.jjb-software.com
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