[Live-demo] Liberal licensing of Project Overviews in LiveDVD, do we want this?

Johan Van de Wauw johan.vandewauw at gmail.com
Thu Jun 30 05:31:51 EDT 2011


On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 2:30 AM, Simon Cropper
<scropper at botanicusaustralia.com.au> wrote:

> Personally I have a problem with Project Overviews, or any technical
> documentation for that matter, being locked up in Commercial-in-Confidence
> derivatives. I think Project Overviews, which can be legitimately be
> included 'as is' in a proposal or design document, shouldn't need to be
> reworked. To me the reworked document, which needs to include your name as
> original author, implies some sort of collaboration has occurred when none
> has occurred. Yes, reworked documents do look better but contribute nothing
> the the broader CC/FOSS/OSGeo community.
>
> But this is my opinion. If you have one - for or against - *especially those
> people that have authored the Project Overviews*, SPEAK UP!

Project overviews are so small that even if a restrictive license
would apply, you could still get away with copying it completely as
sort of citation. We are talking about 2-3 sentences and a list of
features, which -I guess- in many cases have been at least partly
copied and/or inspired from/by other sources often not noting any
license and therefore copyrighted - so if you are so strict about
licensing I'm not even sure we can publish them ourselves.

This whole discussion is imho ridiculous: those who don't care about
licensing will copy from any source for their commercial proposals,
those who do (but given the general rush in which project proposals
usually are written I would doubt if there are many) might contact you
and/or share their changes.

Disclaimer: I learned talking and writing English by copying sentences
from teachers, textbooks and other sources. I'm sorry if my sentences
contain copyrighted material.


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