[Corpora-List] license question

[Emmanuel PROCHASSON]

Andy Roberts a écrit :
> I don't fully agree with your interpretation of 'non-derivative'
>
> 1. You can contribute - simply email your contributions to Paul et al!
> You can't make spin-offs (forks) of the resource, however. Open
> source/Free licenses have never given an automatic right to a
> contributor to force contributions to the project owner/maintainer.
If /Paul et al/ are to give up the project for any reason, there can't 
be new maintainer and all the work done is lost. Free licenses don't 
give any obligation to owner/maintainer, but anyone can fork them (which 
has led to great result such as Blender or inkscape). Such licenses make 
their object perennial (as my french-english dictionnary says :).

> 2. Free/open source projects can "use" non-derivative resources. They
> can't redistributed under the same license as the project that uses it.
> This typically means that it is distributed as a separate component.
> It's a bit like saying an open source concordancer can't process the BNC
> because it doesn't use an open licence!
You are right (the same thing can be said for NC : no commercial project 
could distribute it, but all can use it as a separate component), but 
cc-by-nc-nd is just like freeware : you can freely (like beer) use it 
but that's not free (like freedom) at all and I think that's not 
suitable for scientific work.

NC part implies, for example, that the lexicon can't be distributed in a 
CD-Rom with a proceedings of any conference, as long as the book is 
sold, since this is /commercial/, although commercial here doesn't 
necessarily means "making money with the lexicon". That also means that 
no one can sell the lexicon on CD-Rom, even if the price asked just 
compensate the cost of the cd-rom and the cost of the mail.

Remember that cc-by-sa-* (Creative Commons-Attribution-Share 
Alike-anything else you want) implies that
* derivative work (if allow) are necessarily under the *same* terms 
(Share Alike)
* derivative (if allow) or distributed version necessarily refered to 
original work (Attribution)

which seems sufficient to most usages.

I am not to judge what one want or doesn't want to let done with its 
work, I just want to warn user of those licenses about issue that most 
just don't see. Most of them understand "NC" part as "no one can make 
money with my work" althought it means "my work can't be seen near 
anything related to money".

It seems preferable to me to protect my work from stealing. I agree to 
give my work away but no one is allowed to take my name from it, and no 
one is allowed to derivate it in a not free way. Hypothetic commercial 
version are free too and can be freely distributed with the same term. 
My work has been improved by someone else and the result can still be 
used by everyone, how wonderful !

-- 
Emmanuel Prochasson