On 03/08/2014 09:48 PM, Georg Pfeiffer wrote:
The only problem I see is, which license takes legal force? Will the project be licensed under the MIT (English) License, with the German version provided merely for convenience, or vice versa; or even dual licensed under both. Consider: what if there is a mistranslation, or other error in only one version of the license. Which would take precedence?Dear Sirs, the german trennmuster project [1] provides a LaTeX package de-hyph-exptl wich is part of the debian texlive-lang-german package. The core component is a long list of german words as source for the generation of hyphenation patterns wich is actually not a part of debian. We intend to give the whole project a default license wich is a german translation of the MIT license [2]. The english text is included. Our intention is, that the german text shall be more clear and more convenient to german project members (authors) as well as for german customers wich we estimate to be the majority as well on the author as on the customer side. Are there any concerns about the assignment of a german language license to an almost german project? The sub parts of our project integrated into debian packages will stay further under the common english licenses of course.
I suggest licensing under the MIT license, as is (in English), and specifying (either in German or English (or both?)) that the German translation is merely for reference/convenience sake. I suggest using the English version as the "official" version not to discriminate against German users, but to avoid license proliferation, and to expose any potential legal issues in the license to a wider audience. (And, of course, the community has already established that there are no problems with MIT as is.)
All that said, IANAL, and I do not represent the position of Debian or anyone else.
If you deny a comment because it affects non debian topics only, please give us a hint to a relevant site or discussion. Georg [1] http://projekte.dante.de/Trennmuster/WebHome [2] http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
Regards, Jon