Le Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 10:44:34AM -0500, Yaroslav Halchenko a écrit : > > Or should I advise to use the text of MIT license, verbally and > explicitly describing possible uses and disclaiming any warranty? > but once again without any copyright statement.
Dear Yaroslav, licenses of the family of the MIT or the BSD require to to reproduce copyright statements on derivatives, and I think that it would cause headaches to many to attempt to seriously comply with them. We are blessed that a lot of data is truly in the U.S. public domain and therefore we can use it completely freely. In case deposition in the public domain is not permitted by the law, I would recommend to use very permissive terms. Some people keep it short, with the WTFPL or the politically correcter BOLA, and some people prefer longer terms to hammer the fact that by giving their data, they can not be responsible for disappointments, errors or misuses made by third parties. The Creative Commons Zero was invented for that case. http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/ http://blitiri.com.ar/p/bola/ http://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/ In any case, I recommend to not use the MIT or equivalent licenses that are picky on copyright reproduction, unless it is the will of the copyright holders to have their names accompanying each and every derivative. But can you imagine the mess if one had to track which contributor to acknowledge when reproducing an extract of the human genome ? Cheers, -- Charles Plessy Debian Med packaging team, http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110125055904.ga...@merveille.plessy.net
