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Re: Guile in Emacs
From: |
Helmut Eller |
Subject: |
Re: Guile in Emacs |
Date: |
Sat, 17 Apr 2010 08:46:18 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.0.50 (gnu/linux) |
* Richard Stallman [2010-04-17 06:40+0200] writes:
> The Tex sources of the "draft" of the ANSI standard are available on the
> net[1].
>
> What license do they carry?
Apparently none. The only paragraph containing the word "copyright" is
this:
Special thanks to Guy L. Steele Jr. and Digital Press for producing {\CLtL},
and for relaxing copyright restrictions enough to make it possible for that
document's text to provide an early basis of this work.
>
> The legal status of the Tex sources seems a bit messy, though.
> Apparently the intention of the involved parties was to put them into
> Public Domain but somehow failed to make that formally correct[4].
>
> Can you boil down the facts they found and state them concisely?
At least in this thread, the Debian people didn't find any facts and
only stated that some lawyer would be needed to clarify the issues.
On another message board[1] Peter Seibel summarized the situation:
So here's some info that I got from Steve Haflich of Franz and
onetime chair of XJ13, the committee that brought us the ANSI
Standard. (This is from a conversation we had standing in the lobby
of the Franz office building; I wasn't taking notes. Caveat Lector.)
- At some point in the standardization process it became apparent
that there was a bunch of editorial work to be done and no one to do
it and no funding to pay someone to do it.
- Various organizations involved in the standardization such as
Franz, Symbolics, Harlequin, Apple, and others decided that they
would each contract with Symbolics to pay for a Symbolic's employee,
Kent Pitman, to produce a draft standard which he would then "give"
to ANSI to do with whatever they wished.
- All these organizations agreed that they would place the work (to
which they held copyright since they were paying Symbolics to do it
as a work for hire) into the public domain. Except some lawyer
pointed out that you can't really affirmatively put something in the
public domain. So they did something--not clear what--to assert their
copyright but to allow anyone to use the draft they were paying to
have produced for any purpose whatsoever.
- That draft is the so-called dpANS2.
- ANSI took the dpANS2 and made a few minor copy edits, slapped on
their logo and some front matter, and published it as the ANSI standard.
- Kent Pitman, then at Harlequin then used the dpANS2 as the basis
for the HyperSpec. Franz similarly used it to make their HTML
version. Pitman also fought with ANSI to get permission to do
something (not clear exactly what) beyond what he would have been
allowed to do with dpANS2.
- I'm pretty sure Harlequin (or Xanalys or Lispworks) owns the
copyright to the HyperSpec.
- The issue of copyright on dpANS2 is muddied by the fact that it
includes big chunks of text that were written by Guy Steele for CLTL.
He, according to Haflich, donated that text to ANSI to use in the
standard but it's not clear that the folks (i.e. those companies)
that produced the dpANS actually had the right to use it. Obviously,
from a practical point of view, he and Digital Press, publishers of
CLTL2, haven't been bothered by the fact that their text is in the
HyperSpec and the dpANS, etc. but technically they could probably
make a stink. (Though maybe Pitman actually cleared that with them--
he seems to make a point of being pretty scrupulous about
intellectual property issues.)
- The issue of copyright on dpANS2 is also muddied by the many
small contributions of text by other people who participated in the
standardization process.
So, to answer Don's question, probably not. If one wanted to take the
text of dpANS2 and use it for the basis of a derived work (say an
annotated version), and you wanted to be incredibly scrupulous about
making sure you weren't stepping on anyone's copyrights, you'd
probably need to track down the contracts wherein the companies that
funded the dpANS2 "licensed" it for use by anyone for any purpose.
Then you'd probably want to talk to Guy Steele and/or Digital Press.
And for good measure the known authors of any of the sections of the
dpANS2 that were written by someone else (e.g. Dick Waters, I
believe, wrote large chunks of the section on the pretty printer
since he invented it.) Then, if you really wanted to nail things
down, you'd probably need to contact the 100 or so folks who
participated in the standardization and who may have contributed text.
But probably the right and most efficient thing to do is to find a
good IP lawyer and tell them what, specifically you want to do, and
ask them to help you figure out what you need to do to make sure
you're not exposing yourself to excessive liability by doing it.
-Peter
I don't know how Pitman "asked" ANSI for permission he only writes this
in the HyperSpec:
Parts of this work incorporate material taken from American National
Standard X3.226, copyright 1994, and is used with permission of the X3
Secretariat, ITI, 1250 Eye St., NW., Suite 200, Washington, DC 20005 and
of the copyright holder, American National Standards
Institute. ANSI/X3.226 was developed by Technical Committee X3J13,
Common Lisp.
Helmut
[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg00189.html
- Re: Guile in Emacs, (continued)
- Emacs Info manuals (was: Guile in Emacs), Juri Linkov, 2010/04/16
- RE: Guile in Emacs, Drew Adams, 2010/04/15
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Richard Stallman, 2010/04/15
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Harald Hanche-Olsen, 2010/04/15
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Harald Hanche-Olsen, 2010/04/15
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Richard Stallman, 2010/04/17
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Helmut Eller, 2010/04/15
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Richard Stallman, 2010/04/17
- Re: Guile in Emacs,
Helmut Eller <=
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Richard Stallman, 2010/04/17
- Re: Guile in Emacs, John Wiegley, 2010/04/14
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Helmut Eller, 2010/04/14
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Tom Tromey, 2010/04/14
- Re: Guile in Emacs, David Kastrup, 2010/04/14
- Re: Guile in Emacs, christian.lynbech, 2010/04/14
- Re: Guile in Emacs, immanuel litzroth, 2010/04/14
- Re: Guile in Emacs, christian.lynbech, 2010/04/14
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Stephen J. Turnbull, 2010/04/14
- Re: Guile in Emacs, christian.lynbech, 2010/04/14