On Jul 24, 2013, at 10:50, Ray Dillinger <b...@sonic.net> wrote:
> ((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 > > _______________________________________________ > r6rs-discuss mailing list > r6rs-discuss@lists.r6rs.org > http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss Thanks all for the enormous responses I received. The answer is: you don't need to do anything to change the license. _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list r6rs-discuss@lists.r6rs.org http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss