[tex-live] the "open publication licence"

[Frank Küster]

Robin Fairbairns <Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> we (ctan team) are engaged in updates of several of our user (web)
> interfaces, and this licence arose as a conflict in our existing
> stuff (in one place we list it as a free licence, in another as a
> nonfree one).
>
> can anyone suggest a definitive interpretation, or where we might find
> a definitive interpretation, of the import of the licence?
>
> the licence itself may be seen at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/

I cannot suggest a definitive interpretation.  But I can inform you that

- some people on debian-legal believe that it is non-free, see
  http://people.debian.org/~terpstra/message/20040312.160816.9f618d1f.html 

- one of the Debian ftp-masters, who are the group who actually have to
  judge about licenses, thinks that it is free if a document doesn't
  make use of any of the license's options (like defining and
  restricting "substantial modification" or prohibiting paper copies):
  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=384019;msg=70

  It's typical for James Troup that you don't get an answer if you ask
  again, as has happened in that bug report...
  

I think that it is clear that this license *with*options* is not free.
This is bad, because you would need to add two items for that license:
without options, with one or both of options A and B.  Moreover, there's
a different license, the Open Content License, which is often referenced
by the same acronym, OPL, and also issued by opencontent.org.

I do sincerely hope that the new versions of the GFDL and CC
attribution-sharealike licenses will be free without any doubt, so that
we can actually suggest documentation authors a good license...

Regards, Frank

-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)