Many thanks for your message, as I'm sure you appreciate, we also take
free/open-source software and licensing very seriously, otherwise we
wouldn't have gone through such a long email exchange to obtain
clarification.
Best wishes,
Fran
El ds 23 de 01 de 2010 a les 10:22 -0500, en/na Alan W Black va
escriure:
Fran,
The license we include is a standard CMU license that we have used for a
number of our open source speech products over the last ten years, the
license has been checked by a number of different legal groups both
within and outside CMU. The additional clause 5 has been added due to a
requirement and respect to the original groups involved in the
collections. Although we are aware that some groups may only use the
data if it follows some existing predefined license that they own legal
group has approved, we do not see it necessary to change our license
when we have already had it vetted by a large number of groups.
If this license does not satisfy your particular requirements then
unfortunately this data cannot be used by you. That is a decision that
all developers make when choosing to use external resources.
At CMU we take open source and licensing very seriously and choose the
license conditions based on what we decide will give the maximum benefit
for the potential user groups, without compromising our funding sources
and collaborators. It requires hard decisions and negotiations in order
to please as many groups as we can. In doing so we cannot always please
everyone all the time, but that is in the nature of licenses.
We are fully aware of the consequences of adding clause 5, which we do
not have on much of our open source releases, but we still decided that
was the best option given the data that we have. We knew that this
would exclude some people from being able to use the data, but we still
made that decision.
Alan
Alan W Blackemail: a...@cs.cmu.edu
Associate Professor
Language Technologies Institute http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/
Carnegie Mellon University tel: +1-412-268-6299
5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh PA, 15213, USA. fax: +1-412-268-6298
Robert Frederking wrote:
Well, my understanding is that, unfortunately, most companies won't
touch anything that's under GPL, so I don't think that's a solution. We
don't want to exclude commercial entities.
Bob
Francis Tyers wrote:
First of all, thanks to CMU for releasing the data. I've no doubt it
will be valuable to people working in the field.
I don't particularly like terms like lawyerbomb and obnoxious
advertising clause, but this merits a response.
People who don't get paid to work on the software they develop, aren't
employed by big universities or companies are understandably concerned
about getting sued -- you can say but they've never been sued before,
so why should they worry -- but this isn't really convincing. They can
get frustrated that people make more work for themselves and others.
* Making up your own 'free/open-source' licence: More work for
you, more work for them.
* Choosing an existing tried and tested 'free/open-source' licence:
Less work for you, less work for them.
Furthermore, they can also find it frustrating that a non-profit
organisation would release their work under a licence that is
incompatible with that of over 60% of free software.[1]
Fran
PS. Some of these same issues are reviewed in Ted Pedersen's excellent
2008 article:
http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse/Pubs/pedersen-last-word-2008.pdf
=Notes=
1. http://www.blackducksoftware.com/oss/licenses#top20
El dv 22 de 01 de 2010 a les 18:29 -0500, en/na Job M. van Zuijlen va
escriure:
Some of the verbiage used in this discussion (lawyer bomb...) doesn't
particularly encourage people to make their data freely available.
What happened to common sense? I think CMU's initiative should be
commended.
Job van Zuijlen
From: Robert Frederking Sent: Friday, January 22, 2010 16:32
To: Francis Tyers Cc: mt-list@eamt.org Subject: Re: [Mt-list] Public
release of Haitian Creole language data
byCarnegie Mellon
I'm not a lawyer, but let me start by stating that out intent was
simply that re-use included acknowledgement. This was not intended to
be a splash-screen on every start-up, or making the software pronounce
our names at the start of every sentence. :-) It only has to be
clearly visible in anyone's source files.
We aren't interested in suing people; we are a non-profit research
organization. But like the Regents in California, we have a
responsibility to our sponsors that appropriate credit is given for
our work. So this is intended to be like the old BSD advertising
clause, which is generally considered to be clear from a legal point
of view.
Please use the data however you want; just
