[tex-hyphen] License of hyphenation patterns

[Joseph Wright]

On 10/12/2015 19:18, Xiangye Xiao (肖湘晔) wrote:
> Dear Miss Mojca and other active contributors to tug hyphenation data,
> 
> I found hyphenation patterns of many languages in tug.org (link
> <http://tug.org/svn/texhyphen/trunk/hyph-utf8/tex/generic/hyph-utf8/patterns/txt/>)
> and are interested in using the data. However, licenses of many pattern
> files do not work for us. As such, I reached out to many authors regarding
> changing licenses in the last few days. I got good and bad responses. Some
> authors gave immediate responses, while some emails are unreachable at all.
> 
> After reminded by Author and Claudio (cc'ed here), I realize reaching out
> tug hyphenation mailing list can be more efficient to get connected with
> authors. Could you/TUG help coordinate with authors to change license of
> hyphenation pattern files so that we can use the data? MIT/BSD/Apache
> licenses are acceptable to us, while LPPL/GPL/LGPL v3 are not acceptable.
> Unicode license also works for us but it requires to make Unicode joint
> copyright owner.
> 
> I am not good at the open source licenses, but as far as I know
> MIT/BSD/Apache are liberal and won't affect LaTeX/TeX to use the data. I
> probably can arrange a meeting with an open source license expert on our
> team to answer potential questions if needed.
> 
> Please let me know if you are interested in collaborating with us and if
> you have any further questions or concerns.
> 
> Thanks!
> Xiangye

[Resending after managing to miss out full recipient list]

I'm not a license expert either, but wonder if you could outline what's
the issue with the LPPL here?

Just to add that I assume the issue is not the LPPL (or GPL or ...) per
se but that your use case requires a very 'permissive' license: correct?

Joseph