[tex-hyphen] A "short" summary of the licence-related meeting

[Pander]

Hi all,

Please not that the hyphenation patterns for Dutch are extremely
outdated. They originate from approximately 1995. In 2005, the Dutch
language (used in Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname) has undergone some
spelling changes, rendering these patterns incorrect.

So, please do *not* integrate or use these patterns for Dutch not yet
into new software until there is a newer version available. We expected
these will be there in early 2017. Some people attach great value to
spelling advise found in Google search results or other writing tools
and software. So better no support than incorrect support.

Thanks,

Pander

On 01/13/2016 11:22 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> This is just a short summary of the meeting we had with Google (&
> Mozilla) representatives. We might write a better summary along the
> way, but here are the major points.
> 
> Recently a Google employee (Xiangye) contacted most of the pattern
> authors, asking them for permission to change the licence, so that
> they could include the patterns into Android (and potentially other
> products in the future). It would be great if the problem of the
> constant need to keep relicensing patterns would be solved somehow, so
> that individual project wouldn't have to hunt down every single author
> every few years.
> 
> Why specific licences are not acceptable to Google?
> - LPPL: too ambiguous, confusing and too exotic; it's not that one
> particular clause would be problematic, but the Google employee claims
> that the text is open to too many different interpretations (and with
> no previous cases in courts); citation: "imposes a lot of confused
> definitions of derivative work"
> - GPL: theoretically fine as long as the data is dynamically loaded,
> but they want to avoid problems
> - LGPL: version 2 is conditionally ok, but version 3 is not
> - CC0 (this was a proposal of the "least common denominator" that
> should be compatible with all other licences): they want to avoid it
> due to one particular clause
> 
> Google's preference for the licence would be MIT (or BSD, Apache,
> Unicode). Nobody is aware of any conflicts of the MIT licence with
> other licences (at least not from the opensource world; there might be
> some commercial licences that are not compatible).
> 
> 
> ---------------------------
> Inclusion of patterns into CLDR - Unicode Common Locale Data Repository
> ---------------------------
> 
> We were discussing inclusion of patterns into CLDR from two aspects:
> - technical
> - legal
> 
>>From the legal point of view any patterns that would go to CLDR would
> require author's extra permission. (Thus it might be more convenient
> to keep all patterns at a single standalone place and submit just the
> complying patterns to CLDR.)
> 
>>From the technical point of view it would make sense to also collect
> dictionaries as opposed to just hyphenation data (wherever that is
> even feasible).
> 
> 
> In the long-term perspective it could make sense if pattern authors
> would agree with giving the copyright to the Unicode consortium or
> TUG, so that if a need arises to do something special with the
> licence, Unicode or TUG act in author's behalf (still giving authors
> full credit, but potentially allow relicensing to a more suitable
> license). This is what has been done for OpenOffice years back for
> example. (Apart from lack of authors' consent, one of the potential
> problem might be lack of lawyers in TUG; but TUG would otherwise
> probably be the most suitable organisation for that.)
> 
> 
> ---------------------------
> Feedback from patterns authors to Google's requests
> ---------------------------
> 
> - Many authors are no longer reachable.
> - Many authors agreed to a licence change in response to Google's
> enquiries, but didn't take any action yet (either didn't bother
> enough, didn't have time or didn't know exactly what to do).
> - From those who replied, there was an almost even distribution of
> different licences that authors picked, so at the end Google might end
> up with many different (albeit complying) licences anyway.
> 
> Mojca
>