On Wed, Dec 24, 2003 at 01:40:33PM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote: > On Wed, 24 Dec 2003, Lionel Elie Mamane wrote: >> Every SRFI contains a reference implementation, and bears this >> copyright notice:
>> Is a scheme implementation that includes the reference >> implementation DFSG-free (providing the rest of the implementation >> is, obviously)? > No, unfortunatly, because irregardless of the FAQ, the license is > contradictory, and seemlingly violates DFSG #3. > [Unless there is a provision which I am missing to license the > actual implementation of a reference implementation > separately... Not that I know of. > Could you provide reference to the "procedures for copyrights > defined in the SRFI process"?] The SRFI process is at: http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-process.html >> Doesn't the SRFI copyright notice contradict itself? >> You're probably thinking of the sentence "However, this document >> itself may not be modified in any way [...] except as needed for >> the purpose of developing SRFIs [...]" which might seem to >> contradict the answers to the previous questions. However, this >> sentence is only to prevent passing off a modified copy of the >> document as the document itself. So SRFI x is an inviolable >> entity (and once finalized, very close to cast in amber). But you >> can excerpt from it at will, with attribution. (We have actually >> consulted with several lawyers on this; it is what we intended, >> and it is what it means.) > May I suggest that this particular text of the license actually be > changed to say exactly what is meant, instead of relying on a > lawyer's interpretation of its meaning? This would be too simple... More seriously, I'm running it through debian-legal first to confirm that I'm not the only one thinking in this direction, and we'll see from there. I don't have very high hopes of getting the SRFI editors (and all past authors) to change the license, but well, we can try. -- Lionel
