[tex-hyphen] License of hyphenation patterns

[Xiangye Xiao (肖湘晔)]

Hi Mojca and Others,

I am very sorry for my reply. I missed this email.

Idea A works for us (meaning Google) and sounds like a long-term scalable
solution! I can also forward you my outreaching result with individual
authors. Some of them have already agreed to change licenses.

I have contacted our open source team regarding a meeting, but haven't got
reply. I guess they are on holiday break already. If we do A, we don't need
to meet with our open source expert. I confirmed with him in the past that
having copies of data under different licenses works for us. I'd still like
to meet if you think it is needed.

For these four categories:
- all authors agree
- no feedback from any of the authors
- at least one author rejects this licence
- some authors agree, no answer from others

Do we need to get agreement from all authors to change license?

Please let me know how we can collaborate in the next steps!

Thanks!
xiangye



On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 6:07 AM, Mojca Miklavec <
mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Xiangye (and everyone else),
>
> I didn't see your initial email, but Arthur forwarded your message.
> (Thank you, Arthur.) And sorry for top-posting.
>
> Actually, I saw a number of email messages on the tex-hyphen mailing
> list, but I wanted to take more time and this email came faster and
> with a higher urgency, so I'll try to answer this email first.
>
> Yes, we would be more than happy to collaborate and help you solve issues.
>
> ---------
>
> The situation is as follows:
> - some authors of patterns might be impossible to find (and possibly
> dead already)
> - many authors are responsive and don't really care which licence is
> used (and/or have no clue which one to use; they are happy to share
> their work though, so they are generally happy with any given licence)
> - many authors don't want to be bothered every two years with another
> request to change the licence of the patterns yet another time
> - some authors hate just one or two particular licences (in particular
> those that give away their right to be mentioned as an author; so that
> anyone can drop their name and claim the work to be someone else's)
>
> The problem is that every organization has its own preference about
> licencing. When authors publish (possibly unlicenced) patterns on
> CTAN, they are asked to use LPPL. Then the OpenOffice team comes and
> asks every author to sign a special contract transferring all the
> rights to their legal entity (I remember that some authors were not
> allowed to even mention my name as a "thank you, she contributed some
> patches" because I would have to sign some contract or whatever and I
> didn't bother doing paperwork for them). Then Mozilla comes and asks
> for relicencing into some tri-licence. A few years to the future and
> Mozilla asks for yet another licence again, saying that tri-licence is
> obsolete already. Then another party comes and ask the author to
> relicence the patterns under GPL. Then Apple comes which refuses to
> deal with GPL. tc. This is mostly annoying to authors of patterns and
> we desperately need to solve that.
>
> The problem is that author X might be happy with any given licence. He
> starts with licence A, then relicences the patterns under B after
> getting request from one organization, and then the second
> organization comes for which the licence A would work, but not licence
> B. That leads to a lot of unnecessary confusion.
>
> I was playing with two ideas:
>
> (1) Come up with a list of licences and ask all authors whether they
> agree with those licences or if there is any licence that they refuse.
> Then we would split the work into two parts: bare patterns + licence.
> We could then automatically generate a list of all patterns in our
> repository under all the different (allowed) licences.
> I would create a matrix [languages]x[licences] with every field
> containing one of the following values:
> - all authors agree
> - no feedback from any of the authors
> - at least one author rejects this licence
> - some authors agree, no answer from others
> The last two cases would be followed by more details in some readme
> file. In the first case we would end up with auto-generated properly
> licenced patterns.
>
> If a project Y then comes by and wants the patterns under licence Z,
> they would be free to take them (or start chasing the authors in case
> of missing information about their feedback).
>
> (2) Use a CC-0 licence (or something like that; I should check again
> which licence we were talking about a while back). This would allow
> relicencing in almost any given licence. But we already had a number
> of negative responses and some people replying with "yes, I agree with
> that licence as long as my name stays" (which is in contradiction to
> the licence itself).
>
> In 2008 we decided to bite into cleaning up the encoding mess, while
> leaving the licences intact. But we should bite into the other part
> and clean up the licence mess as well. Better late than never and the
> sooner the better.
>
> (Having another licence expert from the Google team wouldn't hurt.)
>
> Mojca
>
> > ----- Forwarded message from "Xiangye Xiao (肖湘晔)" <xiangye at google.com>
> -----
> >
> > Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2015 11:18:49 -0800
> > From: "Xiangye Xiao (肖湘晔)" <xiangye at google.com>
> > To: mojca at tug.org, "Juan M. Aguirregabiria"
> <juanmari.aguirregabiria at ehu.eus>, cesure-l at gutenberg.eu.org,
> >         tex-hyphen at tug.org, Sascha Brawer <sascha at google.com>
> > Subject: [cesure] License of hyphenation patterns
> >
> > 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
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tug.org/pipermail/tex-hyphen/attachments/20151215/d8a9b8e3/attachment-0001.html>