Re: Establishing dialogue between the Debian project and OGC regarding Document & Software Notice terms
On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 4:44 AM, Walter Landry <wlandry@caltech.edu> wrote:
> Sebastiaan Couwenberg <sebastic@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>> In the PyCSW discussion a good argument was made about the OGC Software
>> Notice terms not being problematic for Debian, because its terms are
>> identical to the W3C licenses and we have files licensed under those
>> terms in main:
>>
>> http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2014-November/027146.html
>> https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/standards/2015-February/000845.html
>>
>> Are the terms of the 'W3C Software and Document Notice and License' DFSG
>> complaint? If so, wouldn't it be sufficient to unambiguously license the
>> OGC CITE tests and XSD schemas under those terms to be DFSG compliant too?
>
> The Software license looks fine. It is the Document license which is
> problematic.
Some of the files we want to distribute (XSD files) have an exemption (from [1]:
XSD files are covered by the document notice below. As a special
exemption, OGC allows redistribution under the Software license if they don't
use the same namespace as the original schemas. This is outlined at:
http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/legalfaq#Software
"Schemas (and DTDs) are frequently part of our specifications and
seemingly fall
under the document copyright terms. However, as long as you do not use the same
formal namespace or public identifier to identify that modified OGC schema/DTD
(which might confuse applications), you may treat the schema/DTD under the
software terms. This means that you are permitted to make a derivative or
modified OGC schema/DTD, but even under the software terms you are obligated to
include/retain the OGC copyright notice. We further appreciate a couple
sentences regarding who made the modifications, when, and what
changes were made
in the original DTD -- a common software documentation practice."
The part "as long as you do not use the same formal namespace or
public identifier" is the tricky part here. It is quite similar to the
DFSG4 "The license may require derived works to carry a different name
or version number from the original software.".
OGC wants a license which guarantees nobody copies standards documents
and makes some changes to them without a change in name. I don't think
that is an unreasonable demand. If we can propose a license which
guarantees this and which is acceptable to Debian, OGC will
investigate whether they can switch to this license.
Kind Regards,
Johan
[1] http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/non-free/p/pycsw/pycsw_1.10.1+dfsg-2_copyright
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