Re: [Notion-general] LICENSE file in contrib

[Philipp H. <ph...@ph...>]

Hi Juri,

thank you for your input and sorry for the long delay.

> 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".

Yes, you are right, after thinking about it some more I share the bad feeling. 
So please forget the LICENSE text I've proposed.

> 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.

Hm, but making the assumption that the scripts of unknown license are in the 
public domain is a much stronger assumption than assuming that they can be 
distributed under the terms of MIT license. If we say "we assume that this 
script is in the public domain", it means that we assume that the original 
author completely forfeited his rights on the script. I have an even worse 
feeling about that.

I'm afraid there is no proper way out of this other than dropping the scripts 
of unknown license ...

Let me send out another e-mail with a suggestion concerning the future of the 
script collection.

Best,
Philipp