[Scheme-reports] You all don't need to do anything to change the licensing

[Musical Notation <musicdenotation@x>]

On Jul 24, 2013, at 10:50, Ray Dillinger <bear@x> wrote:

> ((This is a re-send of my initial response, which I accidentally sent
> to only one person instead of sending to the list.))
> 
> Sigh.
> 
> For the record, all contributions I've personally made to any scheme
> standardization process, I hereby release to be licensed under any
> free-documentation license anyone wants to apply to them, up to and
> including fully releasing them to the public domain.
> 
> .... And yes, in case it isn't obvious, that includes all derivative
> works and the rights to modify, and copy, and distribute modified
> copies, commercially or otherwise.
> 
> I'd be deeply surprised if there exists any contributor, or any heirs
> of a contributor, who would assert otherwise.  I am in fact so certain
> of this that if my pockets were deep enough for it to be credible,
> I'd offer to personally pay to defend the claim in court if by some
> ridiculous alignment of stars it came to court.  It's a sucker bet;
> making a million-dollar offer to defend the "public" interpretation
> of the license might have an amortized value of a dime or a nickel
> considering the odds of any opposing claim being made and needing to
> be defended against.
> 
> 
> On 07/23/2013 07:50 PM, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>> Here's another issue: whose copyright do I put on the copyright page
>> (other than my own)?
>> 
>> If this was just under some Creative Commons license or what have
>> you, it would all be much simpler. They've worried about these issues
>> for years and have clean, unambiguous licenses. (I'd personally pick
>> an attribution + commercial derivative works allowed license, but
>> that in particular isn't my call.)
>> 
>> Anyway, I didn't bring the topic up, but as long as other people
>> mentioned it...
> 
> Well, let's be practical.  Suppose we release the next version of the
> standard under the Creative Commons License, or even explicitly notarize
> and file a legal document with witnesses, etc, that says it is Released
> to the Public Domain.
> 
> While, theoretically, someone could claim that it's a "derivative work"
> of previous R*RS documents and that therefore we didn't have the right
> to do that, such a person would legally have to be someone whose copyright
> was violated by the move.  ie, someone who has a "legitimate interest"
> in the previous standards document/s.
> 
> Somehow, I really don't believe that any such person would file such a
> claim.  The previous contributors to the standards documents were
> in consensus that they were working in the public interest, and for
> the express purpose of releasing the resulting standard to everyone
> without restriction, and explicitly said so in the paragraph everyone's
> been pointing at in answer to this ridiculous question.
> 
> Further, in the extraordinarily unlikely event that someone did file
> such a claim and it got to court instead of getting laughed at by
> the judge, it's a pretty sure bet that their co-contributors would
> cheerfully swear in a court of law that no, any such exclusive claim
> is most definitely not in concordance with the terms under which they
> want their own work on the standard distributed, leaving the claimant
> in the position of having to prove that any particular part of the
> standard were his own work as opposed to being the work of an
> overwhelming majority who oppose his claim.  And that simply isn't
> possible.  The archived, publicly available discussions show that
> every point has been considered and discussed by many people before
> getting into the standard.  There is simply no part of it that is
> even potentially the legitimate subject of such a claim.
> 
> I'm not a lawyer, so this isn't "legal advice" in the professional
> sense, but I see absolutely no risk to anyone in slapping a public
> license on the next version, nor even in declaring it explicitly
> to be released to public domain.
> 
>                     Bear
> 
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Thanks all for the enormous responses I received. The answer is: you don't need to do anything to change the license.
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