Re: Modification of reference material
On Fri, Apr 16, 1999 at 12:05:38PM +0000, Arnoud 'Galactus' Engelfriet wrote:
> Ok, so it's allowed to require something like this:
>
> If you make modifications to the reference, you must document them in the
> file CHANGELOG when you distribute them, and you must change the notice "(C)
> Copyright WDG" to "(C) Copyright WDG, with changes by <your name here>. The
> WDG takes no responsibility for errors in this document." You may not
> distribute the modified files without the CHANGELOG file.
>
> ?
Absolutely! That's a very "light" restriction, which does not make it
anymore less free.
[...]
> I was thinking more along the line of "If you make modifications, please send
> them to us for review. If we approve of them, we'll add them to the official
> distribution and give you appropriate credit. Otherwise, you must <see
> above>."
The wording above is good. I am careful, because if you say "You _must_ send
them to us for review", it would be non-free (that's the "notification
clause" which is very hard to comply to for many reasons). But encouragement
in the way outlined above is absolutely okay. Also, providing alternatives
("send them to us to get them included OR you MUST do <see above>" is fine.
> >Of course you can also say only the very original, unmodified version is
> >allowed to carry the official name. As long as some form of derivation is
> >possible, it is very likely dfsg free (although there are some minor
> >caveeats to avoid. Nothing too serious, though).
>
> The name WDG nor "htmlhelp" is a registered trademark (like Netscape, Mozilla
> and TeX are), so that would be a bit hard to enforce.
It would not be enforcable by trademark law, but pretty much by copyright
law. You can't prevent that other people create other original works under
their copyright under the names "WDG" and "htmlhelp", but you can control
derivatives of your work as much as you like.
> Besides, that wouldn't
> make a big difference: a malicious author could strip all our logos and links
> and pass it off as his HTML reference. This is a "derived work", although one
> we most certainly wouldn't want to allow.
You don't need to allow this. All free software licenses I have seen so far
explicitely forbid stripping all attributions. The details depend on the
concrete situation (for example, the GPL mandates:
" c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively
when run, you must cause it, when started running for such
interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an
announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and [...]"
and the copyright notice also contains the copyright holder of course.
So you can request that your logo is not removed from the front page, for
example. However, there should also be the possibility to take only parts of
the reference for inclusion in other Free projects, and then such clauses
become troublesome (what if I only want to use a small portion of your text
in an ASCII environment. Then I can't display logos...)
> So, in the license we'd put that
> you may only modify the text, but not remove credits, logos and links to the
> official site etc.
I liked the concrete text you wrote above very much, but in general your
summary in the above sentence seems to be slightly too restrictive. In
particular, it would not enable me to take only parts of the document. However,
it should not be too hard to find a license that addresses this in one way or
another.
Thanks!
Marcus
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