[ Sorry in advance for cross posting ]

I'm going over this on the debian-legal mailing list (a good place to
ask about issues in free/open-source software licensing).

There is a question about clause 5 of the licence:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

##  5. Any commercial, public or published work that uses this data
##
##     must contain a clearly visible acknowledgment as to the           ##
##     provenance of the data.                                           ##

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

>From debian-legal:

 My concern is whether, contrary to the favourable interpretation you
 give, this is intended to act like an obnoxious advertising clause.

 In other words, what will satisfy “contain” in “contain a clearly
 visible acknowledgement”? Is it sufficient for the acknowledgement to  
 be “clearly visible” only after inspecting various files in the source
 code?

 Or is the copyright holder's intent that the acknowledgement be clearly
 visible to every recipient, even those who receive a non-source form of
 the work? The latter would be a non-free restriction, like the  
 obnoxious advertising clause in the older BSD licenses.

 This looks, as it is currently worded, more like a lawyerbomb now that 
 I consider it. I would appreciate input on this from legally-trained  
 minds.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Could you confirm if that clause means that the acknowledgement should
be _clearly visible_ to _every recipient_ or would it suffice to be
visible after inspecting the source code?

Thanks for your help in this and best regards,

Francis Tyers


El dj 21 de 01 de 2010 a les 22:59 -0500, en/na Alon Lavie va escriure:
> Hi Francis,
> 
> Thanks for the suggestion, but we were advised to leave the licensing 
> language as is.  Our licensing language is effectively equivalent to the 
> MIT license.and is unambiguous with respect to releasing the data for 
> any use (commercial or non-commercial).
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> - *Alon*
> 
> Francis Tyers wrote:
> > El dj 21 de 01 de 2010 a les 14:49 -0500, en/na Robert Frederking va
> > escriure:
> >   
> >> The Language Technologies Institute (LTI) of Carnegie Mellon University's
> >> School of Computer Science (CMU SCS) is making publicly available the
> >> Haitian Creole spoken and text data that we have collected or produced. We
> >> are providing this data with minimal restrictions in order to
> >> allow others to develop language technology for Haiti, in parallel with our
> >> own efforts to help with this crisis. Since organizing the data in a useful
> >> fashion is not instantaneous, and more text data is currently being 
> >> produced
> >> by collaborators, we will be publishing the data incrementally on the web,
> >> as it becomes available.  To access the currently available data, please
> >> visit the website at  http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/haitian/
> >>     
> >
> > Would you consider also dual/triple licensing the data under an existing
> > free software licence, such as the MIT licence[1] or the GNU GPL[2] ?
> > This way it could be combined with existing data under these licences
> > (e.g. the majority of free/open-source software) and researchers and
> > developers don't need to hire legal advice to determine if they can
> > combine their work with yours.
> >
> > Best regards, 
> >
> > Fran
> >
> > 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Licence#License_terms
> > 2. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Mt-list mailing list
> >
> >   


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