John Cowan wrote:
> You keep ignoring the QPL and the Artistic License,
ah, constructive help is so refreshing ;)
thank you.
someone did mention the QPL license earlier.
I looked at it, but my concern is that it
uses the word "software" everywhere.
I was looking at licensing a MSWord document
or PDF file. If that format is not considered
"software", then the entire license might not apply.
I am not a lawyer, so I'm not sure if its a problem.
There's also the notion of "patches" in QPL,
and that could be widely interpreted when
applied to a Word document. or the license
might be voided if Word doesn't allow "patches"
in the "software" sense. Even though there might
be a document based way of doing "ammendments"
or something similar.
if its not a problem, then I'll just use QPL.
(ok, and that bit at the end saying
"Disputes shall be settled by Oslo City Court."
created visions of long flights to snow covered
court rooms just to straighten out a legal issue.)
brrrr... ;)
I've considered writing the document as a perl
program, such that the program dumps the text
to the screen. And then license the program as QPL.
That might be an option, but then I lose any
formating information and images that may have
been in the Word document.
as far as Artistic License goes, it has the same
problems by refering to "software". Plus, isn't it
pretty much agreed that it's a shaky license?
I know they're intending on rewriting it for Perl 6.
> and everyone else keeps ignoring the fact that
> you mean to allow patches.
oh, you've noticed that too.
;)
given OSI's approval process is so long,
I don't think a new license would get approved
in time to be of use to me anyway.
which is pushing me in the direction of
writing it as a perl program of some sort,
and then licensing the program under QPL.
I'll just have to deal with any images and
formating issues somehow. perl/tk can handle
jpegs, I think, so that will fix that problem.
and the Text widget can create columns, etc.
It'll just be a whole bunch of extra work
to do the conversion.
Also, not everything in Perl/Tk had a print
method, (at least when I was contributing code
to the Perl/Tk effort) which means it might be
some hoop jumping to get a printable version of
the document. I don't know if all the perl GUI
widgets have print methods now or not. That might
have changed.
And all of this just because there's
no license for Word documents, PDF's, etc.
Rather than simply have a documentaion license,
I have to do a bunch of work to make my document
look like software so I can license it with an
OSI approved license. It just seems odd to me.
Greg London
--
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