Ben Finney wrote: > 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. That meaning may be "original" but it is new to me and I have not heard developers in our community use the term that way. In general we talk about: 1. Protocol = the data that gets sent over the wire 2. Specification = documentation of a protocol 3. Software = a program that implements a protocol 4. Service = a deployed instance of a software program 5. Hardware = a physical machine that runs a software program or service For the developers in our community, I want it to be crystal clear that they have the right to implement the protocol in code, deploy the protocol in a service, instantiate the protocol in hardware, or do the usual things with the specification (copy, print, condense, expand, translate, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sell, etc.). We have had enough confusion about "does the Jabber Software Foundation produce software?" over the years, which is a big reason why we changed the name of the organization (not a fun process!). I want to keep such confusion to an absolute minimum. If that means we need to modify an existing license in creating our legal notice, then so be 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. If and when I adopt that way of thinking, then I would agree. But I'm not there yet. Question: when a document is printed, does it become hardware, or something else? Peter -- Peter Saint-Andre https://stpeter.im/
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