Re: LSR issues

[Erik Sandberg]

On Sunday 13 February 2005 23.13, Sebastiano Vigna wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-02-13 at 23:02 +0100, Erik Sandberg wrote:
> > I found 2 general issues about the LSR, for your todo:
> >
> > - First, someone pointed out that it doesn't work properly with Opera. I
> > verified with W3C's validator (http://validator.w3.org/), that at least
> > the main page http://lsr.dsi.unimi.it/ is _not_ valid html.
>
> Let's put things in perspective.
>
> The mistake you point out is a missing couple of quotes that wasn't
> there up to yesterday--my mistake. The entire site validates
> flawlessly--I'm pretty maniac about validation and formal specifications
> in general. 

OK! that's great, I didn't know about this. I apologize.

The reason for my remark was pure prejudice. The website looks a bit hi-tech, 
and it happens (too) often that hi-tech-looking pages use bad html. When 
someone reported that it didn't work, I just did a quick w3c check.

> For a comparison, lilypond.org's homepage has no DOCTYPE and 
> produces 12 errors.

ouch.. this should be fixed!

> > - We should decide about the licensing. My guess is that we want to make
> > the snippets public domain. And I don't think anything gets public domain
> > unless you specify that explicitly. You can get help on how to write
> > public domain statements at: http://creativecommons.org/
>
> I thought about that, and I would have put up the question myself.
>
> The problem with public domain is that we are going to put in snippets
> from the manual, and the manual is not public domain.
>
> One solution is to state clearly in the entry form that whatever you
> write because part of the manual, and that by entering your snippet
> you're transferring copyright to "the authors" (that's what's written in
> the Copyright statement of the manual: we probably need something more
> explicit), which will distribute it under the GFDL.
>
> I don't think anyone will be put down by such a statement, and it would
> allow, say, to distribute an automatically generated snippet manual
> without legal problems.
>
> On the same line, I started to distribute all the sources of the
> infrastructure under the GPL (even if they won't compile presently as
> they need a custom MG4J).

Another alternative is to ask all authors of test/ code, if they are willing 
to donate those snippets to Public Domain, using some kind of dual-licensing. 
I think most (all?) of it was written by the core developers, so there aren't 
too many people to ask.

IMHO, there is a big point in using PD for LSR: Many snippets may be directly 
usable by cut&paste in .ly files, and it would be good to allow everyone to 
do this without restrictions.

Erik