[CCed to Andrew McMillan; please see item 3 below. Feel free to ignore the rest of the message.] Eddy Petrisor wrote: > I need an advice regarding a licensing issue. > The story is: > There is this dictionary on line for my native language(Romanian). This > is not just a dictionary that contains a word list, but an explainatory > dictionary which contains definitions for every word that exists in > Romanian (or at least 99%). Currently the dictionary is licensed under > the GFDL license, which, as all of us know, is non-free. > > As the dictionary is so complete I intend to expand the aspell, ispell, > *spell -ro dictionaries with words extracted from the afore mentioned > dictionary. Sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. > Now comes in the tricky part: > The copyright holder believes in free software, but he doesn't want his > work to be used in proprietary projects. So he wants some sort of > license that would be simillar to GPL, but fitted for a dictionary. OK; that goal is definitely doable, through the use of a copyleft Free Software license. Please note that the GPL doesn't need to be "fitted" to different classes of works. It can apply to programs, documentation, literature, images, sounds, videos, 3d models, and any other form of material. It can most definitely apply to a dictionary, and this would be an excellent choice. Also note that almost all copyleft licenses are incompatible by nature, so the GPL is most likely the only good copyleft license which is GPL-compatible, which is a good property to have for such a work, as it is likely to be combined with other works in various ways. > 1. What kind of license should I use in order to be able to expand the > spelling dictionaries? Any Free Software license will support this goal. > 2. Would GPL with a clarification clause would suffice? The GPL alone, without a clarification clause, should suffice. [Andrew: this is the part I CCed you about.] > 3. Would GFDL with a clause would suffice? > (Note: I am asking because I found this in whereami.8 man page: > >> This manual page was written by Andrew McMillan >> <debian@mcmil- >> lan.net.nz> for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used >> by oth- >> ers). Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or >> modify this >> document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, >> Version >> 1.1; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts and no >> Back-Cover >> Texts. This is not a free license. This text is boilerplate from an old Debian manpage template, from before we realized the issues with the GFDL, and we are still dealing with the problems caused by that unfortunate template. This template has since been revised to use the GPL, and we have been contacting the authors of manpages licensed under the GFDL to get them to relicense. I have CCed Andrew McMillan for this purpose; Andrew, would you have any objections to relicensing this manual page (and any others you may have written that are licensed under the GFDL) under the GNU General Public License, version 2? It is theoretically possible to take the GFDL and rescind all the problematic clauses making it non-free. However, nobody has written such an exception statement, and such a statement would probably be moderately complex. In addition, the resulting license would be quite cumbersome, as well as incompatible with the GPL. Furthermore, assuming the author does not make use of the non-free features of Invariant Sections or Cover Texts, they are not really using any GFDL-specific license features anyway, so there is little point in using the GFDL. If the author is concerned about compatibility with the GFDL, he can certainly dual-license the dictionary under *both* the GPL and the GFDL. > 4. Is it possible for him to release periodical wordlists under another > type of license, like the creative commons? (I feel that he cares more > for the words' definitions than the word list itself) He can certainly release wordlists under a separate license. As the sole copyright holder (which I assume he is), he can license his works under any license or set of licenses that he chooses. However, the Creative Commons licenses are not currently a DFSG-Free choice, due to a few minor license issues which Debian is attempting to resolve with Creative Commons. We hope that they will become DFSG-Free licenses in the future, but for now a wordlist under one of these licenses would not solve the problem at hand. If he releases the entire dictionary under a Free Software license such as the GPL, there is no need to go to the additional effort of licensing the words separately, unless he wishes to grant additional permissions to the wordlist that he does not grant over the dictionary. (It is also useful to note that raw lists of words with no definition may not be copyrightable at all, depending on the creativity put into the selection of which words to list. It sounds like the author is goinng for a complete list of all words, which is most likely not copyrightable.) > 5. Is there a suited license for wordlists (that keeps the list > non-proprietary)? Is there a suited license > for an explainatory dictionary? See above; the GPL should work just fine for a wordlist and for a dictionary. Hope this helps, - Josh Triplett
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