Re: location of UnicodeData.txt
On Mon, Dec 02, 2002 at 10:43:42AM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> Jim Penny <jpenny@universal-fasteners.com> writes:
>
> > Now, where in the Unicode license does it give you permission to create
> > derivative works? The license does say "Information can be extracted
> > from these files...". Oh, and you have to provide "an accompanying notice
> > indicating the source".
> >
> > The license does not say that any of the information in files provided
> > by the Unicode Consortium can be modified (except by "extraction").
> > This makes it fail DSFG guideline 3.
>
> What about the null extraction, done by using the extraction tool
> named "cat"?
>
As far as I can tell, this is permitted. It would not be permitted
under normal copyright law, but the license does permit arbitrary
"extraction". Extraction of the entirety still appears to be
extraction.
What the Unicode Consortium does not say is what the distribution rights
are relative to the subsetted tables. This is a license weakness, but
I suspect that any sane judge would hold that giving permission to do the
extracting implies giving permission to distribute the result.
But, I suspect that any sane judge would also say that extraction for
the purpose of "license laundering" is not implied. That is, you could
not take the Unicode Consortium's file, apply cat to it, and relicense
the result under BSD (for example).
Now, what is Unicode Consortium really saying here? They are saying
that you are allowed to use subsets of Unicode. For example, you may be
interested in only a few languages. You may select the relevant
portions of the table out. Or, if you know that you don't care about
bidirectionality, ligation, extenders, grapheme link, or any of the
other various and sundry attibutes, you may drop them. In other words,
you can do either row or column projection if that is advantageous to
you. But they clearly do not want you to modify anything, including
character name! Character name is a searchable field, which some
applications may need.
Jim Penny
>
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