Copyright of the desktop configuration specification (careful, here be dragons)

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Wed, 2005-09-28 at 09:31 -0400, Jim Gettys wrote:

> I'll ping Eben Moglen on this one, along with Michael Tiemann.  It is a
> point of law that I think hasn't seen enough thought in open source/free
> software, and one that will be increasingly common as we "grow up" and
> have more and more formal specifications for our important systems and
> protocols.  It would be good if the SFLC and OSI could tackle this issue
> and come up with a single good copyright for documentation and
> specifications, and avoid lots of copyright proliferation, and the
> resulting headaches of bad interactions between these copyrights and the
> copyrights used on the code itself.

Well, I would be very interested in the development of such a copyright.
Regretfully I'm not a lawyer and really don't know much about law and
copyright.

I think what is important is (x). I really don't know how to put these
words into law-language.

(x)

o. That the specification must always be free and available for
everybody. All animals are equal. Period. So not with the "but some are
more equal". Both members of an opensource community AND commercial
vendors have equal rights to the specification. For me this is extremely
important.

The purpose of the copyright should be trying to keep the equality in
rights for ever and ever.

o. That extensions to the specification should be possible to make.
However, if you want to call your specific implementation an
implementation of the original specification: You'll need to publicise
the specifications for those extensions using the same copyright that
the original specification had. Or you need to provide an implementation
that is open source.

o. Forking the specification should be possible if and only if you keep
the the same copyright that the original specification had.

o. Add some clausule for patents. I wouldn't like it if a company would
indeed publicise an extension but could also patent it. Because that
would make it nearly impossible for a member of the free software
community to implement the extension.

o. Etcetera.

It's not that I want to make it impossible to create a closed source
implementation. Nor that I want to make it impossible to create another
non publicised specification. But if you do, I wouldn't want you to call
your implementation an implementation of the original specification. You
can call it an implementation of your own specification "whatever" if
you like.

If you'd create a closed source implementation with extensions, what
IMHO would be useful is if I could make it obligatory for you to
publicise your specification of any new elements (protocols, rules,
schemas, etcetera),.


ps. Replace "you" and "me" with the right persons.



-- 
Philip Van Hoof, software developer at x-tend
home: me at pvanhoof dot be
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
work: vanhoof at x-tend dot be
http://www.pvanhoof.be - http://www.x-tend.be