[Debian-l10n-devel] [Translate-devel] Looking at translate-toolkit 1.10

[Stuart Prescott]

Hi Alexander,

Many thanks for the clarification on the authorship and ability to redistribute 
the stopwords file. I think the statement you have already made is sufficient for 
everyone to be happy now, but I just want to be a little more verbose in my 
reasoning here so you understood why the question was being asked to begin 
with.

> This file was my own creation, based on research and experimentation that I
> did (I did collect a number of stopword lists from various places around
> the internet, but they were more inspiration than source).  I am also
> responsible for the rather obscure syntax in the file
[...]

I would read that as saying that the file expresses your intellectual input 
into the problem and creativity in coming up with a solution to it. You would 
have copyright over that file as a creative expression. There are (almost) no 
cases where you (or your employer) does not own copyright on what you write 
when you sit down at a keyboard.

> My feeling about these sorts of configurable/tuning files is that
> explicitly stating the copyright within them misses the point - they are
> intended to be adapted for the use of particular projects - there really
> is no way to distribute them in non-source form in any case.  

Sure -- but that doesn't change that you own the copyright on that file and it 
was a clarification of the copyright and permission to distribute of the source 
file that we're talking about here. Source vs non-source is not important to 
the question.

> I tend to
> prefer to keep things simple and leave them in the public domain, even
> though I know that the concept of public domain is not globally
> applicable. 

You need to explicitly put them into the public domain (ignoring arguments 
about whether you can actually do so or not); you don't "leave" them in the 
public domain, but perhaps I'm being overly picking about the use of the word 
"leave" in that sentence.

I think everyone will be happy to accept your previous mailing list post as 
confirmation that you believe this work should be in the public domain that 
they will be happy with this, but a public statement to this effect (in the 
file!) is always the best way of making sure that people know that the work is 
indeed in the public domain.... that includes people like me who may come 
along years later and say "where did this file come from? Am I allowed to copy 
it?".

Your point about true(1) is well made but I think that belittles the more 
extensive, creative and broader scope of the stoplist compared to "exit(0)". 

> Still, in this case where the file is just a bunch of English
> words with some not-quite-random punctuation right before them, I don't
> see much benefit to an explicit license on its contents.

An explicit licence allows me to copy the file; no explicit licence (and no 
statement that it is public domain) means I can't. That's a pretty good reason 
to have one ;) The alternative is to assume (hope!) that it is part of the 
translate-toolkit package in which case the compilation licence (GPLv2+) would 
apply... but you've actually indicated in your message that assuming it was 
GPL'd would be incorrect.
 
> But if anybody feels that they want to put an explicit license into it,
> lines beginning with '#' are comments in the file, and I hereby give my
> permission to anyone to do so, in the spirit of the old AT&T /bin/true
> (see http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/ATT_Copyright_true.html).

So for future reference, an embodiment of the "public domain" spirit that you 
are looking for that should be accepted across jurisdictions is the CC0 
licence [0]. The WTFPL [1] might appeal more to your opinion of licensing 
terms [1], or of course any of the BSD/MIT/Expat licences are also permissive 
licences that also achieve what you want.

[0] http://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/
[1] http://www.wtfpl.net/txt/copying/

thanks again
Stuart

-- 
Stuart Prescott    http://www.nanonanonano.net/   stuart at nanonanonano.net
Debian Developer   http://www.debian.org/         stuart at debian.org
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