LisbonLicensingDiscussion

Moderator: WoodleyPackard

Scribe: [wiki:JeffGood Jeff Good]

Background

The purpose of this discussion was to discuss what decisions DelphIn needs to make with respect to software and product licenses. Two important classes of resources were discussed: the actual computational tools and resources used by DelphIn in language processing and the documentation in the DelphIn wiki.

The current state of affairs

Many of the projects affiliated with DelphIn have already adopted licenses of one sort or another. Some have no license. This is summarized here.

* [wiki:PetTop PET], [wiki:HeartofgoldTop Heart of Gold], and [wiki:ItsdbTop Itsdb] are all licensed under the [http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)]

* The [wiki:LkbTop LKB], ERG, and the [wiki:MatrixTop Matrix] are all licensed under the [http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php MIT license]

* Hinoki and the German Grammar are closed

* The DelphIn wikis, the Norwegian Grammar, and the Modern Greek Grammar are not currently under any specific license

* The group was unsure of the licenses used in tsdb and [http://yz-windows.sourceforge.net/ YZ Windows] (which is used in [wiki:LkbLui LUI])

Which licenses might be suitable for DelphIn resources

All of the discussion in this section should be prefaced by the disclaimer that no one participating was a lawyer and, therefore, none of the comments or advice given here should be understood to be completely accurate. Only a lawyer can give completely competent advice in the area of licensing.

There was general agreement that there should not be one required license for all DelphIn resources. Rather, individual projects could choose the license or licenses most appropriate for their needs. Furthermore, since DelphIn is not a legal entity in any sense, DelphIn itself can not license any resources.

A summary of different software licenses can be found on the [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html GNU Project's software licensing page].

For projects where open source licenses are a possibility, it was discussed that the [http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html GNU General Public License (GPL)] it was probably not ideal for many DelphIn projects since it requires that any software using a library licensed under the GPL to also be open source. This might be considered too restrictive by corporate sponsors of DelphIn research. The LGPL and MIT licenses adopted by some of the DelphIn projects are free software licenses which do not have this added requirement. (For example, NTT was satisfied with the LGPL but not the GPL.) It was also suggested that the [http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php BSD] license might be appropriate for DelphIn resources. This license allows the source code of a project based on open source software to be closed if major changes are made to it.

Since choosing an appropriate license may be difficult for many DelphIn members, it was suggested that members from projects who have chosen a license discuss why they chose a particular license on the wiki. This discussion may be helpful to projects which have not yet chosen a license. The relevant wiki articles can be linked to from the LicensingChoices page.