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/ [email protected] Debian Developer http://www.debian.org/ [email protected] GPG fingerprint BE65 FD1E F4EA 08F3 23D4 3C6D 9FE8 B8CD 71C5 D1A8 GPG fingerprint 90E2 D2C1 AD14 6A1B 7EBB 891D BBC1 7EBB 1396 F2F7 _______________________________________________ Debian-l10n-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/debian-l10n-devel
