Re: SRFI copyright license
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
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