From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jeff King Subject: Re: Licensing a file format (was Re: SVN Branch Description Format) Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:59:18 -0400 Message-ID: <20120320225918.GA31958@sigill.intra.peff.net> References: <4F5C85A3.4080806@pileofstuff.org> <4F668BD4.70808@pileofstuff.org> <20120319013422.GC19680@burratino> <4F6797AD.2070501@pileofstuff.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Cc: Jonathan Nieder , Andrew Sayers , Git Mailing List , Sam Vilain , Stephen Bash , Nathan Gray , Sverre Rabbelier , Dmitry Ivankov , Ramkumar Ramachandra , David Barr , semen.vadishev@tmatesoft.com To: Andrew Sayers X-From: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Tue Mar 20 23:59:26 2012 Return-path: Envelope-to: gcvg-git-2@plane.gmane.org Received: from vger.kernel.org ([209.132.180.67]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1SA81W-0005iL-4S for gcvg-git-2@plane.gmane.org; Tue, 20 Mar 2012 23:59:26 +0100 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1759291Ab2CTW7V (ORCPT ); Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:59:21 -0400 Received: from 99-108-226-0.lightspeed.iplsin.sbcglobal.net ([99.108.226.0]:54727 "EHLO peff.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1759266Ab2CTW7U (ORCPT ); Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:59:20 -0400 Received: (qmail 15393 invoked by uid 107); 20 Mar 2012 22:59:35 -0000 Received: from sigill.intra.peff.net (HELO sigill.intra.peff.net) (10.0.0.7) (smtp-auth username relayok, mechanism cram-md5) by peff.net (qpsmtpd/0.84) with ESMTPA; Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:59:35 -0400 Received: by sigill.intra.peff.net (sSMTP sendmail emulation); Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:59:18 -0400 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <4F6797AD.2070501@pileofstuff.org> Sender: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Precedence: bulk List-ID: X-Mailing-List: git@vger.kernel.org Archived-At: On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 08:31:41PM +0000, Andrew Sayers wrote: > > Yes. By the way, I think fear of forking/discussion of potential > > improvements/translation into other languages in the context of > > standards is misguided. If you would like legal protection for your > > standard, that is what trademark law is for. > [...] > > Could you expand on this? A quick tour of the git codebase suggests > your objection is just to the "no derivatives" bit for documentation, > and not to the MIT license for code? > > It sounds like you're saying that forking isn't a big real-world > problem, which I guess makes sense - it'll all work out in the end as > long as a single standard is in everybody's interests. So the CC-BY > license is my favourite for now. I think the problem is that there are two levels of forking. You want people to be able to build off of your standard for a number of legitimate reasons. Perhaps they are publishing a draft proposal of enhancements. Perhaps they are adapting parts of the content of your standard to a different domain. Perhaps the original author has become unresponsive and somebody else wants to pick up maintainership. Those are all things we do with code, and they help the ecosystem. What _isn't_ good is somebody modifying your standard and then claiming that their implementation is "the real SVN History Description" format. I think Jonathan's point is that CC-BY-ND doesn't allow the legitimate things in the top paragraph. And your real problem (in the second paragraph) is not derivatives, but derivatives claiming to be something they are not (the official standard). And trademarks are the legal tool for avoiding confusion like that. In practice, I don't think this kind of name-hijacking is a big deal. There are many forks of git, and somebody could make a derivative git that is buggy, interacts badly with existing repository formats, or interacts badly with other git clients via the network protocol. But people are usually kind enough not to call their other implementations "git", and it just works out in practice. So you could probably get by with just a regular source code license (but I am far from an expert, so take the appropriate grain of salt). -Peff