[tex-hyphen] License of hyphenation patterns

[Xiangye Xiao (肖湘晔)]

Hi Mojca,

Let me know if there are still confusions and you want a meeting with our
open source expert and engineer.

Thanks!
xiangye

On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 7:46 PM, Xiangye Xiao (肖湘晔) <xiangye at google.com>
wrote:

> 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
>>
>
>
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