Re: [exslt-manage] licensing

On Wed, 2005-05-18 at 18:40 +0100, Mordecai Zibkoff wrote:
> I would like to use exslt as part of a commercial product. what if any
> licensing things do I have to worry about?

I can't answer you formally, and that is problem #1 with EXSLT right
now.  The licensing is unclear.  For my part, they current work product,
including the Web contents and the template-based implementations, are
public domain.  Jeni explicitly said the same on the list:

"Yes; all the EXSLT functions and templates are free for anyone to use."

It would be nice to have something more formal in place.

My thoughts on the matter, again from last year:

-- % --
[Shall we use] the CC "Attribution" license?

http://creativecommons.org/learn/licenses/

Credit would be to exslt.org.  Of course, that's not a legal entity, so
this idea needs debugging.
-- % --

The legal entity bit is the most complicated issue here.  We'd have to
assert copyright, and we need someone to assign the copyright to.  We
could say it's Copyright Jeni, Dave, Jim and Uche, but I suspect this
would complicate matters a bit because we're in different countries, and
such joint copyright is always a little tricky.

We could also just leave it all in the public domain, and assert that
fact better.

I need to hear from folks what they think about this matter.  I need
help resolving it.

For now, Mordecai, I wouldn't worry.  I think the clear intent of public
domain for EXSLT to this point means that no one can cause you trouble
for using EXSLT in a commercial app.  I certainly am not interested in
any copyright approach that forbids use in commercial apps.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net                    http://fourthought.com
http://copia.ogbuji.net                   http://4Suite.org
Use CSS to display XML, part 2 - http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/x-dw-x-xmlcss2-i.html
XML Output with 4Suite & Amara - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/04/20/py-xml.html
Use XSLT to prepare XML for import into OpenOffice Calc - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-oocalc/
Schema standardization for top-down semantic transparency - http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think31.html