Re: licensing of XMPP specifications
Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter@stpeter.im> writes:
> As Executive Director of the XSF, I am willing to push for a change
> to the licensing so that the XEP licensing is consistent with the
> DFSG.
Thank you for actively pursuing this worthwhile change.
> Although we need to complete some due diligence and come to
> consensus in our community before settling on a license, it appears
> to me that the MIT license would be appropriate.
Yes, I'd agree with that.
> (If it were up to me I would place the documents in the public
> domain, but that may not be consistent with the consensus of our
> community or the XSF's intended role as a neutral third party and
> intellectual property conservancy for Jabber/XMPP protocols.)
It's a great shame that the debate is distorted by the term
"intellectual property", which is both nebulous in its application and
begs the question of how to treat ideas at all.
> However, the MIT license talks about software, not documentation or,
> more precisely in our case, protocol specifications.
Yes. Only under an unnecessarily narrow definition of "software" does
it equate to "programs"; and even then, it's notoriously difficult to
define when a collection of bits is a "program" but is not a "text
document".
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.
> Is it considered acceptable (for the purpose of DFSG compliance) to
> formulate a legal notice that is nearly identical to the MIT license
> but that talks about specifications instead of software?
It should be even simpler to accept the fact that, as digitally
encoded information, a specification document *is* software and thus
can be covered by the MIT license terms with no modification.
--
\ "Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why |
`\ is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has |
_o__) evolved to do." —Douglas Adams |
Ben Finney
Reply to: