((This is a re-send of my initial response, which I accidentally sent
to only one person instead of sending to the list.))
Sigh.
For the record, all contributions I've personally made to any scheme
standardization process, I hereby release to be licensed under any
free-documentation license anyone wants to apply to them, up to and
including fully releasing them to the public domain.
.... And yes, in case it isn't obvious, that includes all derivative
works and the rights to modify, and copy, and distribute modified
copies, commercially or otherwise.
I'd be deeply surprised if there exists any contributor, or any heirs
of a contributor, who would assert otherwise. I am in fact so certain
of this that if my pockets were deep enough for it to be credible,
I'd offer to personally pay to defend the claim in court if by some
ridiculous alignment of stars it came to court. It's a sucker bet;
making a million-dollar offer to defend the "public" interpretation
of the license might have an amortized value of a dime or a nickel
considering the odds of any opposing claim being made and needing to
be defended against.
On 07/23/2013 07:50 PM, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> Here's another issue: whose copyright do I put on the copyright page
> (other than my own)?
>
> If this was just under some Creative Commons license or what have
> you, it would all be much simpler. They've worried about these issues
> for years and have clean, unambiguous licenses. (I'd personally pick
> an attribution + commercial derivative works allowed license, but
> that in particular isn't my call.)
>
> Anyway, I didn't bring the topic up, but as long as other people
> mentioned it...
Well, let's be practical. Suppose we release the next version of the
standard under the Creative Commons License, or even explicitly notarize
and file a legal document with witnesses, etc, that says it is Released
to the Public Domain.
While, theoretically, someone could claim that it's a "derivative work"
of previous R*RS documents and that therefore we didn't have the right
to do that, such a person would legally have to be someone whose copyright
was violated by the move. ie, someone who has a "legitimate interest"
in the previous standards document/s.
Somehow, I really don't believe that any such person would file such a
claim. The previous contributors to the standards documents were
in consensus that they were working in the public interest, and for
the express purpose of releasing the resulting standard to everyone
without restriction, and explicitly said so in the paragraph everyone's
been pointing at in answer to this ridiculous question.
Further, in the extraordinarily unlikely event that someone did file
such a claim and it got to court instead of getting laughed at by
the judge, it's a pretty sure bet that their co-contributors would
cheerfully swear in a court of law that no, any such exclusive claim
is most definitely not in concordance with the terms under which they
want their own work on the standard distributed, leaving the claimant
in the position of having to prove that any particular part of the
standard were his own work as opposed to being the work of an
overwhelming majority who oppose his claim. And that simply isn't
possible. The archived, publicly available discussions show that
every point has been considered and discussed by many people before
getting into the standard. There is simply no part of it that is
even potentially the legitimate subject of such a claim.
I'm not a lawyer, so this isn't "legal advice" in the professional
sense, but I see absolutely no risk to anyone in slapping a public
license on the next version, nor even in declaring it explicitly
to be released to public domain.
Bear
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