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Re: free licensing of TEI Guidelines



On 2004-02-12 17:45:39 +0000 Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net> wrote:

I meant that preventing TEI-incompatible and TEI-unauthorised
elements from being in the TEI namespace seems fine to me.
Perhaps, but it is not DFSG-free.

I don't think it needs to be done by copyright licences, but I'm not sure cautioning against it makes it non-free.

Putting our own forms into TEI's namespace would be similar to
claiming that they said something they did not.
No it isn't - not unless you *explicitly* claim that it was TEI who
said it.

To me, that is exactly what abusing TEI's namespace does. The XML Namespaces specification says: "The attribute's value, a URI reference, is the namespace name identifying the namespace. The namespace name, to serve its intended purpose, should have the characteristics of uniqueness and persistence." (from section 2, definition 2)

If you put unauthorised things into the namespace of the TEI standard, then you are claiming that they are part of that standard, because the namespace is a unique persistent identifier for the standard's tags. This would be explicitly misrepresenting TEI's view.

It is OK to say that one must make the derived text conspicously state
that it is not the original author's original specification. But it is
not OK to forbid me from speaking about things they don't like.

While they ought not to forbid you from adding your own elements from your own namespace to the spec, or alternative fair descriptions of their elements, it seems OK to assert that you cannot claim TEI endorsement for your elements through namespace abuse. Many DFSG-free licences already caution licensees against fraudulently claiming the original author's endorsement.


References

Tim Bray, Dave Hollander, Andrew Layman (eds.) "Namespaces in XML" World Wide Web Consortium, 14 January 1999, currently available at http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xml-names-19990114

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