[tex-hyphen] License of hyphenation patterns

[Stephan Hennig]

Hi Xiangye,

Am 10.12.2015 um 20:18 schrieb Xiangye Xiao (肖湘晔):
> 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.

So many words, so many questions:

1. Who are you?

2. What is your use-case?

3. What exact problem(s) are you facing with existing pattern files?

4. What is the benefit of changing licenses to BSD-style ones

   4a. For you?

   4b. For developers?

   4c. For third-party users?

Thank you for comprehensive answers!

Stephan Hennig
(co-maintainer of German hyphenation patterns)