License drafting #158
License drafting #158
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The current state of the LICENSE file is meant to reflect the practical concerns I turned up when doing a search and comparison of the licenses used for other "specification-like" projects in the broader FOSS ecosystem. It's also written to try and be somewhat reusable for other projects, both in a small "pay it forward" sense and also just in case I or other folks who have contributed need it to put onto some similarly scoped standards-like document in the future. Questions certainly welcome. Wording questions might be easiest via the review/comment mechanism in the PR front-end; broader or philosophical topics might be easier to conduct as an issue. |
…implementation is not considered a derivative work.
…these documents' when referring to any scenrario that might involve just one portion of the docs and not necessarily the whole kit and kaboodle.
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This commit fixes an error in the 'above/below' wording caused by me rearranging things. It also attempts to clarify the wording around permitting code-snippets to be reused without condition.
A lingering question is whether or not the license needs to specify that the covered bits are marked up with particular semantic tags. That would be easy to do for a fixed output, like HTML <code>, <pre>, and <tt>, but would not be very flexible if someone regenerated LaTeX output, for instance.
Finally, this commit adds a 'do not make quotations of longer than 20% of the original work' clause to the quotation section. This is an arbitrary number, but the intent is to stop a potential bad actor from quoting 100% of the work in a comment and sneaking around the other terms that way. It may warrant further revision, since I am not certain that 20% is a useful number when all of the character tables and build documents are included.
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The intent of the "these documents"/"the work" distinction here is that we want to be clear when enumerating permissions that pertain to the entire work, such as redistributing it, and still be clear when discussing activities that would only apply to one page/paragraph/idea. E.g., you might implement support for JUST ONE shaping model, so the Implementation section doesn't say you have to implement 'the work' in order to be in compliance. Not sure everyone will find that nuance useful, but they might.
This PR is here for people to easily track and provide feedback to the "LICENSE.md" document.
Hopefully that's more accessible than assuming people will figure out how to switch to the
licensebranch in the GitHub UI.