[tex-hyphen] updating the license of language patterns

[Georgi Boshnakov]

Dear Mojca,

Thank you for your reply. 

I am happy for the license for the Bulgarian hyphenation patterns to be changed to MIT. 


Thanks,
Georgi

-----Original Message-----
From: Mojca Miklavec [mailto:mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com] 
Sent: 31 March 2016 22:55
To: About TeX hyphenation patterns.
Cc: Georgi Boshnakov
Subject: Re: [tex-hyphen] updating the license of language patterns

Dear Georgi,

On 14 December 2015 at 13:28, Georgi Boshnakov wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am the author of the Bulgarian hyphenation patterns included in hyph-utf8.
>
> I have had a number of inquiries about changing the license of the bg patterns.
> Also, Moica sent an email some time ago with a related proposal but it seems that it didn't get along.

A while ago we were thinking about the option to ask authors to agree with CC0 which seemed like the most liberal licence at that time, but it later turned out that it has some caveats that make it unacceptable for some potential users.

The reason why I didn't send further emails is that I didn't want to spam every author with a zillion of (potentially conflicting) emails, asking for one thing and then for another in a couple of weeks or months. We would like to get it right the first time. With some authors, that might be the only chance we have before our mails start landing in the spam folder :)

> What is the procedure to update/change files now that the hyphenations are under one roof?

We are still drafting a "call to authors" to explain the situation (and why LPPL doesn't work for many parties) and don't want to bother everyone with random request that will change in a few weeks. However we'll be very happy to implement changes for Bulgarian right away if you give us the permission to do so.

It is sufficient if you let us know your decision (you can do that on this mailing list) and we can commit and upload the changes to the relevant places ourselves. If you have any actual updates like changes of patterns or hyphenation exceptions, it would be better to send us the file. (We currently plan to do some further changes to the tex files anyway, changing free form of text preceding the patterns to a human-readable & computer-parsable form.)

According to users of patterns the MIT licence seems to be the best choice so far, usable in all the projects that we are aware of. (You can also explicitly permit the use of some additional licences like LPPL if you want, even if that probably won't have impact.)

Mojca