Re: [Notion-general] LICENSE file in contrib

[Juri H. <ju...@fa...>]

On 11/01/12 at 03:20pm, Philipp Hartwig wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I propose to replace the current contrib/LICENSE file by the following 
> statement:
> 
>     This directory contains a collection of user-contributed scripts for Notion.
>     
>     Each script starts with an "Authors" header, indicating the respective
>     copyright holders, followed by a "License" header, indicating the software
>     license the script is released under.
>     
>     For a script with an "Authors" header of "Unknown", it is assumed in good faith 
>     that the script is in the public domain.
>     
>     For a script with a known copyright holder but with a "License" header of
>     "Unknown", it is assumed in good faith that the script has been contributed to
>     the Ion/Notion script collection for other people to unconditionally use and
>     modify. This intention is very well reflected by the MIT license, see
>     http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php . We therefore assume that such 
>     a script can be distributed under the terms of the MIT license.
> 
> Let me note that these assumptions are backed by the copyright file of the
> ion3-scripts Debian package, see [1], which even states that a script with a
> "License" header of "Unknown" is in the public domain. 
> 
> Also our own website[2] includes a "public domain" notice, which at least
> backs the assumption on scripts with an "Authors" header of "Unknown".
> 
> So in both cases, people would have had years to complain in case they disagreed
> with the above assumptions.
> 
> Opinions? Objections? :)

Hello Philipp.

Normally I would prefer MIT license over public domain, because the
latter is no license at all and might be even more confusing than any
other "real" license.

However, after some deliberation, I have a queasy feeling about just
taking some script without knowing author's
initial intention and terms of distribution/usage of the script and
say: "now it's MIT". 
If we consider such scripts public domain it would
be like "we found it laying here, it's not ours, but looks like we may
use it and so do you unless the owner appears and disallows this". So we
wouldn't insult anyone in any way, since we didn't take the liberty to
change any conditions of something we don't own.

In other words - as much as legally and ethically OK should be licensed
under MIT. The rest should be handled as neutral as possible. Probably
public domain is something that would suit in that cases.


Greetings
Juri

> 
> Best,
> Philipp
> 
> [1] http://snapshot.debian.org/package/ion3-scripts/20070515.debian-1/
> [2] http://notion.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=notion/contrib;a=blob_plain;f=index_git.html;hb=HEAD

-- 
Juri Hamburg
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