Francesco Poli wrote:
On Wed, 09 Jan 2008 10:29:54 -0700 Peter Saint-Andre wrote:MJ Ray wrote:[...]That's my highest priority here, followed by meeting the needs of the XSF's "customers" (developers and service providers).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 licensecould follow the DFSG.That is something I would again like to thank you for.About license proliferation, several years ago the XSF (then the JSF, long story) proactively asked OSI to obsolete the old "Jabber Open Source License", so we've done our part on that score. :)Well, you helped in deprecating a redundant license (-1), but now you are proposing to introduce a new one (+1). Since -1 + 1 = 0 you are now about to nullify your previous good deed. That's why I'm trying to recommend you against this action!
I previously provided my reasoning as to why the stock MIT license is not appropriate. In sum:
I don't agree with the strange definition of "software" that some people subscribe to on this list, and using that definition would confuse the developers and service providers who implement and deploy the specifications produced by the XMPP Standards Foundation. The XSF is a standards development organization, not a software conservancy or producer of code -- and I cannot stress strongly enough that this distiction is extremely important in our community. We need to make it 100% clear to developers and service providers exactly what they can do with our specifications (write code implementing the specifications, deploy services conformant with the specifications) as well as the relationship between the XSF's work (protocols) and their work (software and services). If such people are confused, it will prevent the XSF from achieving its mission, and above all I as the Executive Director of the XSF cannot let that happen.
Furthermore, the XSF is not presenting this combination of copyright notice, permissions notice, and disclaimer of warranty as a standalone license. This is merely a set of legal notices that we will include in each protocol specification that we publish. This set of notices is not and shall not be labelled as "The XSF License" or somesuch.
We seem to have consensus that the legal notices I have posted here are DFSG-safe. Therefore I think we have met the needs of the Debian project in this regard and I thank you for your feedback.
Perhaps bold text will help. I'll play around with the formatting somewhat. The license will appear only in HTML files, not ASCII as I've pasted here, so we have some leeway about formatting.Please take into account that your license will likely be converted into plain text by some redistributors (think about debian/copyright files, e.g.).
Well then I guess it's back to ALL CAPS and a SHOUTY DISCLAIMER. Peter -- Peter Saint-Andre https://stpeter.im/
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