On Tue, Mar 06, 2001 at 10:31:00PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
Some truly insignificant comments.
>
> mpg123 MPEG layer 1/2/3 audio player
>
> This has a hand-rolled license. Is there a freely-licensed MP3
> player available? I am aware of the patent issues but view them
> with scorn.
Try mpg321, now in unstable. It doesn't do everything that mpg123
does, but they are working on it.
> wdg-html-reference WDGs HTML 3.2, HTML 4, and CSS references
>
> It is my opinion that standards documents should be freely
> licensed, and Debian should probably try to convince the W3C to do
> so.
First, those aren't the specs. The specs are all available at the W3C
website, under the license described here:
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/copyright-documents
and explained by the FAQ here:
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/IPR-FAQ.html#Documents
This license is very non-free, however, the odds of that ever changing
are zero, and I have to say I agree with them. You wouldn't want
someone else publishing a "revised" version of their standards, since
that would defeat the purpose of the standard. Even if they called it
something different, there would still be a problem.
As an example of why this is sometimes true, and accepted by all those
we hold high and mighty ( :-) I offer the license of the GPL (which is
in main, despite having a much more restrictive license than some of
the things in non-free).
Really, I don't want to start a flamewar on this. But I don't think
that trying to convince the W3C to relicense their specs is a
worthwhile use of our time.
sam th
sam@uchicago.edu
http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
GnuPG Key:
http://www.abisource.com/~sam/key
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