On 27/02/14 21:38, Florian Schlichting wrote:
I'm in the process of packaging PerlIO::utf8_strict for Debian. The module includes in its CPAN distribution a 2010 copy of the file quickbrown.txt, very similar to the one you make available at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/quickbrown.txt. This file contains your name at the top and a mention that the copyright for the Thai example is owned by the Computer Association of Thailand, but I was unable to find any license information either in that file or its vicinity.
I never added a copyright or database licence because the file is largely a compilation of other people's work, mostly with unknown authors. All I feel able to do is to promise that I won't sue your project or anybody regarding their use of this file. On the contrary, I am very delighted that your project finds it useful, and that it has helped to get the Linux/Unix community interested in UTF-8 nearly two decades ago. I would be happy to release any copyright that I might share in this file under e.g. a Creative Commons Attribution licence, but I am not confident that Creative Commons is suitable for a compilation of samples. I am not even sure that single-sentence pangrams fall under copyright legislation: they are at the very short end of what might count as a work of authorship. If it had been a piece of example code, I would have simply added the line License: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/short-license.html which links to a page that explains my political reluctance to add formal copyright licences to work that is probably far too short and trivial to fall under copyright legislation. You may feel reassured by the fact that since I compiled the quickbrown.txt file, others have taken that list, expanded it significantly, and put it onto Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pangrams and I have not seen there any copyright concerns raised either. I might add a non-licence phrase like "share any enjoy" to the next version, to alleviate due-diligence copyright concerns without contributing to an impression in the community that even short sentences can actually be copyrighted. The Thai example including its copyright message is exactly as I received it. I left the copyright message intact mostly because it sounded odd and interesting with its royal reference. Unfortunately, I lost the contact details of its contributor. Hope this helps ... Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ || CB3 0FD, Great Britain -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
