Hi Marc, Marc Nieper-Wißkirchen <xxxxxx@gmail.com> writes: > Am Sa., 9. Dez. 2023 um 00:19 Uhr schrieb John Cowan <xxxxxx@ccil.org>: > > >> >> On Fri, Dec 8, 2023 at 10:41 AM Maxim Cournoyer <xxxxxx@gmail.com> >> wrote: >> >> >>> [...] >> >> >> We de-facto instituted what my colleague Richard Fontana once >>> >> called the “Rule of Three” — assuring that any potential FOSS >>> >> license should be met with suspicion unless (a) the OSI declares >>> >> that it meets their Open Source Definition, (b) the FSF declares >>> >> that it meets their Free Software Definition, and (c) the Debian >>> >> Project declares that it meets their Debian Free Software Guidelines. >>> >> >> For our purposes, it is important that the license not be copyleft, so >> that the code or text can be incorporated into Scheme implementations and >> their associated documentation, which is an explicit feature of the SRFI >> project. Code under the GNU GPL, for example, is useless for this purpose, >> since only a few implementations are licensed under any version of the GNU >> GPL. >> > > I'm afraid I have to disagree here. If a sample implementation is licensed > under a copyleft license and cannot be incorporated into a particular > Scheme implementation because that implementation is not licensed under the > GPL, it is the problem of that Scheme implementation, and the author must > not be persuaded to choose a weaker license. On the contrary, the Scheme > implementer should be persuaded instead to choose the GPL. > > (Some may disagree with these ethical aspects, so in the end, it has to be > up to the individual author of the sample implementation to decide whether > a copyleft license or a weak free license is appropriate.) I appreciate your strong stance toward the free software cause, but for the goal of SRFIs sample implementations, which I assume is to maximize participation and usefulness across as many Schemes as possible, it seems fitter to use a permissive (weak) rather than copyleft (strong) free software license. Even Guile, a GNU project, would have its effective license changed from LGPL to GPL if combined GPL licensed sources as it is LGPL licensed. [...] >>> I've opted for the pragmatic solution, which is to mark these >>> insignificant files as MIT licensed, knowing it wouldn't be found >>> protected by copyright in court anyway (no harm done), which was >>> suggested somewhere. >>> >> > If files carry no license (so the license status is unclear), a license > must not be added without consent by the author. Either it is > insignificant, in which case nothing would have changed in front of a court > anyway, or it is significant, in which case it would have been wrong to > guess and attach a license. That's going to make things a bit more difficult. Reaching out to historical SRFI authors has yet to produce a reply. On the other hand, this highlights the importance of adding guidelines to have SRFI authors ensure their submission is clean with regard to 'reuse lint', so that we do not need to hunt down their consent many years from now. -- Thanks, Maxim
