Peter Saint-Andre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > As Executive Director of the XSF, I am willing to push for a change > to the licensing so that the XEP licensing is consistent with the > DFSG.
Thank you for actively pursuing this worthwhile change. > Although we need to complete some due diligence and come to > consensus in our community before settling on a license, it appears > to me that the MIT license would be appropriate. Yes, I'd agree with that. > (If it were up to me I would place the documents in the public > domain, but that may not be consistent with the consensus of our > community or the XSF's intended role as a neutral third party and > intellectual property conservancy for Jabber/XMPP protocols.) It's a great shame that the debate is distorted by the term "intellectual property", which is both nebulous in its application and begs the question of how to treat ideas at all. > However, the MIT license talks about software, not documentation or, > more precisely in our case, protocol specifications. Yes. Only under an unnecessarily narrow definition of "software" does it equate to "programs"; and even then, it's notoriously difficult to define when a collection of bits is a "program" but is not a "text document". On the contrary, "software" is more sensibly contrasted with "hardware", and covers any information in digital form — whether that information happens to be interpreted as a program, an audio stream, a text document, some other kind of digital data, or several kinds at once. > Is it considered acceptable (for the purpose of DFSG compliance) to > formulate a legal notice that is nearly identical to the MIT license > but that talks about specifications instead of software? It should be even simpler to accept the fact that, as digitally encoded information, a specification document *is* software and thus can be covered by the MIT license terms with no modification. -- \ "Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why | `\ is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has | _o__) evolved to do." —Douglas Adams | Ben Finney -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
