And with regard to copyright, it is reasonable for a publishing/standardisation process/body/group to hold the copyright and decide on its distribution. I have never heard of a process where each individual contributor retained copyright to their piece - such a thing would become unreasonable very quickly.

-elf

On March 17, 2019 5:13:43 AM UTC, John Cowan <xxxxxx@ccil.org> wrote:

On Sat, Mar 16, 2019 at 10:50 PM elf <xxxxxx@ephemeral.net> wrote:

I will add my support to Arthur and go one further:

The idea that reference/sample implementations require licences i find abhorrent.

If it was truly a _reference_ implementation, that is, one whose behavior *defines*

the standard, that would make sense.  But SRFI implementations are just exemplary:

they prove an implementation is possible at all.

 

SRFIs are a kind of community standards process.
Reference implementations are a vital part of that process.
Copyright may technically be applicable, but licencing should have no part in it.

If there's no license, there's no right to reuse at all: you can read the implementation,

but you can't copy it into your program.  That's the plain fact of the

matter.  Arthur's right that the existing license applies to the software, which

means that if it incorporates anyone else's software (as many of mine do)

that incorporated code had better be under a permissive open source license.

It has been so far, fortunately, because it's mostly coming from other SRFIs.

But that won't always be true.

-- 

John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        xxxxxx@ccil.org

The present impossibility of giving a scientific explanation is no proof

that there is no scientific explanation. The unexplained is not to be

identified with the unexplainable, and the strange and extraordinary

nature of a fact is not a justification for attributing it to powers

above nature.  --The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. "telepathy" (1913)