Re: licensing of XMPP specifications
Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter@stpeter.im>
> [...] Unless separate permission is granted,
> modified works that are redistributed shall not contain misleading
> information regarding the authors, title, number, or publisher of the
> Specification, and shall not claim endorsement of the modified works by
> the authors, any organization or project to which the authors belong, or
> the XMPP Standards Foundation.
>
> IPR Conformance
>
> This XMPP Extension Protocol has been contributed in full conformance
> with the XSF's Intellectual Property Rights Policy (a copy of which may
> be found at <http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/ipr-policy.shtml> or
> obtained by writing to XSF, P.O. Box 1641, Denver, CO 80201 USA).
I think you should make it clearer that the IPR Conformance section
is not part of the copyright or permission notice and does not need
to be (must not be? I'm confused about it) retained in modified works.
I suggest moving it after the Warranty, after some *s or -s and putting a
note by it, telling developers what to do. I know it should be obvious
what to do with it, but I've seen simpler things got wrong before (CC
trademark terms).
About Specification - I'm not bothered about that wording. I don't think
the arguments against using MIT/Expat hold water and I'm very unhappy
about XSF making a new licence, but at least work under this license
could follow the DFSG. The copyright when XSF license it is covering
a specification and if a modified work is something else, that doesn't
change the nature of what your copyright was, as far as I can tell.
It would just add other copyright interests.
About CAPITALS - the judge in the US case of Stevenson v. TRW Inc.,
987 F.2d 288, 296 (5th Cir. 1993) has goofed. It's well-known that
large areas of capitals are harder to read than mixed case, so putting a
warranty notice all in capitals is a way to make it *less* conspicuous,
reducing the number of people who read it. To play safe, I'd put the
header in capitals, with *s and stuff around it, so it's conspicuous
by that stupid definition, but leave the disclaimer itself in mixed
case, so people will actually read it.
See http://www.tc-forum.org/topicus/ru28theu.htm
Thanks and good luck,
--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
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