<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title></title> <style type="text/css">p.MsoNormal,p.MsoNoSpacing{margin:0}</style> </head> <body><div>Hi Egmont,<br></div> <div><br></div> <div>I don't think it's important to use licensing to prevent incompatible versions of the specification. Compatibility is important, but it's ensured by having a single place which everyone agrees is the canonical version of the specification. Many specifications are also usefully amended and updated in later versions, to clarify details or add extra capabilities - this could be harder if the license forbids modifications and the original author is no longer actively involved.<br></div> <div><br></div> <div>If there's any doubt on whether an implementation is a derivative work of the specification, I think it would be best to add a note that implementations are not meant to be bound by license conditions on the specification. But I'd favour using a simple permissive license for the specification in the first place.<br></div> <div><br></div> <div>Best wishes,<br></div> <div>Thomas<br></div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div>On Wed, Jan 2, 2019, at 1:02 PM, Egmont Koblinger wrote:<br></div> <blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div>Hello,<br></div> <div><br></div> <div>I'm new on this list. I've been working on a specification for a few months that will kindly be hosted on FDO.<br></div> <div><br></div> <div>Pretty much the only remaining step is to pick a license for my work.<br></div> <div><br></div> <div>I've seen some relevant discussions on this mailing list between March-May 2018. What I haven't seen, though, is some evaluation of the potential licenses and guidelines to pick one, nor the final choices you went for.<br></div> <div><br></div> <div>I tried to read and interpret some of the popular licenses. The lack of good web search matches, and in particular [1] and [2] suggest to me that there isn't any designed or well suited for specifications.<br></div> <div><br></div> <div>My first big dilemma: I'm wondering what does "free" mean in the context of specifications, and what does FDO want it to mean on its site and in its overall vision.<br></div> <div><br></div> <div>My instincts tell me that a "free specification" should be one that everybody is free to implement, without imposing restrictions on the implementation. That is: okay to implement in a closed source commercial application. As per [1], it's unclear whether an implementation of a specification counts as "derived work" or not, and thus whether CC BY-SA allows this.<br></div> <div><br></div> <div>Debian's guideline of being "free" instead seems to focus on the modification and distribution of the material in question instead. E.g. they only consider GFDL free if it doesn't have an invariant section. For a piece of software or documentation, Debian's is a reasonable approach. For specifications I don't think so. And this leads to my second big dilemma.<br></div> <div><br></div> <div>For specifications, even for "free" ones, I think it's outright undesirable to create and distribute modified work. In order to avoid incompatible specifications competing against each other, resulting in quite a mess and poor interoperability between implementations, contributors should be pushed to improve the original specification whenever feasible (e.g. the project is maintained actively), or perhaps come up with extensions as separate new projects that potentially refer to the original one, but should not create forks and slightly altered variants (especially in backwards incompatible ways) of the original.<br></div> <div><br></div> <div>Not sure if this restriction belongs to the license, though, or should sort itself out by other means, e.g. by the original work having some "respect" and the community refusing to go with forks.<br></div> <div><br></div> <div>Also note that even if the license chosen for a specification disallows the creation of modified work, it should probably still be allowed if done with the explicit intent of sending suggested modifications back to mainstream. (If I understand correctly, CC BY-ND doesn't allow the creation of publicly visible merge request?)<br></div> <div><br></div> <div>I would not like to release my work to the public domain / CC0 or so. Ideally I wouldn't want others to distribute my work (the specification itself, or parts of it) commercially, so I'm not keen on CC BY either. And, since I'm not a laywer, I wouldn't want to come up with something custom.<br></div> <div><br></div> <div>Something that occurred to me as a little bit of custom, though, is CC BY-SA clarifying that implementing in commercial apps is okay. Since I'm not confident enough to amend the CC license by a sentence, technically I'm thinking of addressing it by dual-licensing my work under CC BY-SA and a self-written sentence along the lines of "okay to implement anywhere, all other rights reserved". Users would need to pick one of these two, contributors would need accept this OR-combination of them. This is the approach I like the most so far, but I'm not sure if it makes sense to you guys too, or if maybe you see a red flag.<br></div> <div><br></div> <div>Or, what happens if I just release without any licensing? What are the downsides of that approach? Why is it important or encouraged to have a license? Aren't the "legal defaults" of any published work without a license good enough, and perhaps closer to what I imagine than any of these existing license texts? Note that most of the standards I used during my work, e.g. ECMA ones, come without a license.<br></div> <div><br></div> <div>What do you guys think of these? Which licenses did you consider? Which ones do you or do you not recommend? Which one did you end up choosing for specifications, and what were the main reasons behind your decisions?<br></div> <div><br></div> <div>Thanks a lot,<br></div> <div><br></div> <div>egmont<br></div> <div>(gnome-terminal/vte developer)<br></div> <div><br></div> <div>[1] <a href="https://lu.is/blog/2008/03/27/brief-cc-licensed-specification-rant/">https://lu.is/blog/2008/03/27/brief-cc-licensed-specification-rant/</a><br></div> <div>[2] <a href="https://creativecommons.org/2008/03/29/what-good-is-a-cc-licensed-specification/">https://creativecommons.org/2008/03/29/what-good-is-a-cc-licensed-specification/</a><br></div> </div> </div> <div><u>_______________________________________________</u><br></div> <div>xdg mailing list<br></div> <div><a href="mailto:xdg@lists.freedesktop.org">xdg@lists.freedesktop.org</a><br></div> <div><a href="https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg">https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg</a><br></div> </blockquote><div><br></div> </body> </html>