Re: [Openclips-development] Documentation License and BWCLIPS

[Thomas S. <ths...@gm...>]

On Wed, 06 Oct 2004 19:06:14 -0700, Tim Cook <tw...@sh...> wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-10-06 at 16:32, Thomas Sutton wrote:
> 
> > The FDL?
> >
> > Isn't there supposed to be a lot of controversy over the FDL and just
> > how non-free it is? Are the debian people still frothing at the mouth
> > over it? If they are, they probably won't ship OpenCLIPS (or they'll
> > just re-write our documentation if they do).
> 
> Where Debian people are concerned there is always controversy. <g>
> (btw: Debian is all I run on production servers)
Personally, I've never had much time for Debian. If I was that worried
about "freedom", I'd use BSD :-)

> If they publish a Debian Documentation License I/we will read it and
> consider it.  Otherwise, is there another viable choice?
Do we really need a documentation licence? Documentation is a
copyrightable work in the traditional sense, so I imagine the moral
rights of authors, etc still apply. What more is needed?
 
> > On the BWCLIPS front: it builds against TCL/TK though I'm not sure
> > which is in control, so to speak. Actually, strike that, CLIPS is
> > using Tcl_Eval to do stuff to widgets, so I'm guessing the user
> > interface is in TCL/TK and the CLIPS engine is in control (much/most
> > of the time).
> >
> > It is also missing a file clsltpsr.c and mentions modifying line 263
> > in the 'fish translation of the README.
> >
> > I couldn't find any file header comments, never mind anything that
> > looked like a copyright statement in any of the files I looked at.
 
> Given this then, is it possible to compare it to the current OpenCLIPS
> CVS and get anything useful?
It generates a really big diff and there have been a lot of changes
since they BWCLIPS was made. The latest date on the files from the tar
is 20/12/1999 and the latest date on the files from the CLIPS distro
is 07/22/94 (version 6.10). A lot of the things in the diff look to be
ordering of declarations, whitespace at the end of lines, etc so maybe
running indent over both trees and diffing again might be more useful.
I won't have time to acutally do this until next week some time.

If we could get a copy of the official distribution they based their
work on, we'd be able to get a patch that we could port forward, but
I'm not sure how much it'll get us. By the look of it, only the
interface, and the built-in editor have touch TCL, so there might be
useful stuff in there, all we'd need to do is make it work with
environments.

> Would we be better off just ignoring it?
Depends on if we can find someone who knows spanish :-) I think that
if they have implemented a full backward chaining extension to CLIPS
and it is of suitable quality, it may be worth the effort getting a
useable patch to port forward to use in our code.

> Regards,
> 
> 
> Tim

Cheers,
Thomas Sutton