[liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: New License Proposal
- From: "John Gardner" <john.gardner@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2008 11:26:38 -0800
This strikes me as almost comically absurd. If a person makes braille
tables for themselves and never shares them with another living soul, nobody
would know they've done it. So living on a desert island may preclude them
from sharing but it also precludes anybody from knowing. So it is only when
tables are distributed or otherwise shared with others that the license
restriction has any force. In practical terms it is not affected by a
desert island test.
However if we were to add some language to the license to make that
restriction not apply to a person living on a desert island with no
possibility of communicating with others, I would have no objection.
Provided that this absurd addition would overcome the absurd objection by
Devian.
I sure do have better ways to use my time!
John Gardner
-----Original Message-----
From: liblouis-liblouisxml-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:liblouis-liblouisxml-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Eitan
Isaacson
Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2008 10:00 AM
To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: New License Proposal
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
For a description of the software and to download it go to
http://www.jjb-software.com
Other related posts:
