[tex-live] license question

[Frank Küster]

Stephan Hennig <mailing_list at arcor.de> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> on behalf of the German speaking hyphenation pattern development team
> I'd like to ask a question regarding a licensing issue.
>
> We plan to licence our results under different licenses:
>
> (i) the LaTeX package dehyph-exptl with hyphenation patterns under
>     LPPL,
>
> (ii) the underlying list of hyphenated words and scripts to
>      generate patterns under a copyleft flavoured license.
>
> There's no problem with (i), however for (ii) we're unsure what exact
> licence to chose.  I think GPL is more aiming towards software,

It was developped originally for software, but I don't see a reason at
all not to use it for documentation. And it's being used for that, too.

> Note, a word list might be the basis for other applications
> than word hyphenation, e.g, spell checking.

In other words, it would again become part of a programmatical work
("software" in your terminology).

> We've thought about
> Creative Commons BY-SA, but I've been surprised that CTAN doesn't
> provide to chose that among the licences labelled "free".  Is CC-(BY-)SA
> considered free by the CTAN and TeX Live teams?  

I don't know about the CTAN or TeX Live opinion on that (if there's
one), and I don't even know what debian-legal thinks about it. But you
can find some information on criticism, also by Debian, of the CC
licenses on 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_licenses#Criticism

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Debian Developer (TeXLive)
ADFC Miltenberg
B90/Grüne KV Miltenberg