Re: licensing of XMPP specifications
Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter@stpeter.im> writes:
> Ben Finney wrote:
> > On the contrary, "software" is more sensibly contrasted with
> > "hardware", and covers any information in digital form — whether
> > that information happens to be interpreted as a program, an audio
> > stream, a text document, some other kind of digital data, or
> > several kinds at once.
>
> Within the context of our developer community, it is pretty clear
> what is a specification and what is software.
In that community, it is pretty clear what is a specification and what
is a program. Both programs and the specification documents, when
encoded in a digital form, are software, like any other
digitally-encoded information.
It would make your task of choosing a well-understood license easier
if you instead used "softwaree" in its original,
contrastted-with-hardware meaning, and not the narrow "programs only"
meaning that some retrofit to it.
> Indeed, a XEP defines a wire protocol, which can be implemented in
> software, hardware, or a network-aware service. So as far as I can
> see, it is even more important for the XSF to clearly specify that
> the protocols it produces can be instantiated in software, hardware,
> or services. But the XSF itself does not produce software.
The XSF might not produce *programs*, but if it produces
digitally-encoded information — documents, specifications, messages,
or whatever — then it produces software that is copyrighted by
default, and can be licensed under free software license terms.
--
\ "Ours is a world where people don't know what they want and are |
`\ willing to go through hell to get it." -- Donald Robert Perry |
_o__) Marquis |
Ben Finney
Reply to: