Re: free licensing of TEI Guidelines
On 2004-02-11 19:44:36 +0000 Syd Bauman <Syd_Bauman@Brown.edu> wrote:
The goal here is not to prevent modification of the guidelines, nor
to prevent the creation of non-TEI derivatives, but rather to prevent
confusion between the two.
Could you achieve this goal by endorsing official versions with
digital signatures, created with the GnuPG keys of the TEI-C members?
I think the TEI Guidelines could then be published under a normal
DFSG-free licence without any other caveats, but you could probably
require other names be used for derived works if you still wished.
Ultimately, I think you should accept that you cannot *prevent* fraud
attempts, but only try to give yourselves some tools to react to them.
Being able to prove authenticity seems a good tool.
Apparently Debian finds these minor restrictions acceptable. So I've
been thinking that if we can write either
a) a copyleft notice that requires those who modify the Guidelines to
retain unmodified or delete in its entirety the section that
defines TEI conformance, or
Is required deletion significantly better than required invariant
retention? I'm not sure.
b) a copyleft notice that requires that modified versions of the
Guidelines describe documents with a different root element name
(perhaps, similar to "<?xml", reserving any string that matches
"^[Tt][Ee][Ii]") and to not use the TEI namespace.
<?xml ...?> is a processing instruction, not a root element. I don't
think that limiting the root element really achieves your goal.
Preventing non-TEI forms using the TEI namespace seems fine to me, but
I could be wrong.
So, is (b) compatible with Debian, and if so, would someone be
willing to help me write up a copyleft notice? If not, does anyone
have any suggestions?
I strongly encourage you to use a common copyleft notice rather than
writing your own and consider using digital signatures to authenticate
official versions, quite apart from the copyleft notice. I think the
DSL may meet your needs.
--
MJR/slef My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
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