Am Mittwoch, 11. Januar 2006 07:17 schrieb Ashley Yakeley:

In article <036EAC76E7F5EC4996A3B3C3657D41160426B64D@EUR-MSG-21.europe.corp.microso ft.com>,

"Simon Peyton-Jones" <simonpj@microsoft.com> wrote:

...

My suggestion would be

* One license for the Wiki. If a contributor wants to put up material with a different license, then link to it as Udo suggested. (This also makes it clear that the link is to material that is not to be edited by others, whereas by definition the entire Wiki actively solicits editing by others.)

* That license should be maximally permissive. Anything viral defeats B(ii). Preferably even more permissive than BSD (e.g. no obligation to display a copyright notice. Who would the copyright notice be *to*?) I'm not fussy about the details. Just some way of saying "You can do what you like with this material".

I think we're going for public domain, assuming we can also add text to satisfy German law, etc. The [[Project:Copyrights]] page will have the statement.

I cannot see why we should create problems for people like me if we can make live so much simpler with using a very permissive license instead of public domain. What does public domain give you what the very permissive license doesn't?

[...]

<http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HaskellWiki:Community_Portal#Mandatory.2F Optional_license_straw_poll>

Where can I get an account for the wiki? I don't want my IP address to appear in some history. Or isn't the wiki configured to store IP addresses like Wikipedia does? By the way, why aren't there any links like "Discussion" and "Edit" on the top of the page? Best wishes, Wolfgang

Am Mittwoch, 11. Januar 2006 19:19 schrieb Ashley Yakeley:

[...]

AFAIK IP addresses are not stored at all, but I haven't examined the code for this.

Hello Ashley, Wikipedia stores and displays IP addresses if the user which did the edit wasn't logged in.

[...]

Best wishes, Wolfgang

I wrote:

Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:

...

Yes, BSD might be too "restrictive". So let's put every wiki content under a very permissive license like the one Udo proposed. Opinions?

Presumably a very permissive license might include the phrase "public domain" in any case? Does anyone want to draw one up?

How about this one (from <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Donate_to_the_public_domain>)? "I, the creator of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. "In case this is not legally possible: "I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law." I'd rather use this than attempt to draw up my own. -- Ashley Yakeley

In article <200601120622.34664.p.turner@computer.org>, Scott Turner <p.turner@computer.org> wrote:

I wonder, though, whether adding a disclaimer is needed. If you take the "by" out of the Creative Commons license, as ajb suggested, then the major feature remaining is the disclaimer. Along with that is verbiage which makes the license much longer in order to require that the license remains associated with the "work".

The Creative Commons project helpfully provides a public domain declaration, that may be preferable to the earlier one I cited (although it doesn't have a disclaimer either): <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/> "The person or persons who have associated work with this document (the "Dedicator" or "Certifier") hereby either (a) certifies that, to the best of his knowledge, the work of authorship identified is in the public domain of the country from which the work is published, or (b) hereby dedicates whatever copyright the dedicators holds in the work of authorship identified below (the "Work") to the public domain. A certifier, moreover, dedicates any copyright interest he may have in the associated work, and for these purposes, is described as a "dedicator" below. "A certifier has taken reasonable steps to verify the copyright status of this work. Certifier recognizes that his good faith efforts may not shield him from liability if in fact the work certified is not in the public domain. "Dedicator makes this dedication for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of the Dedicator's heirs and successors. Dedicator intends this dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights under copyright law, whether vested or contingent, in the Work. Dedicator understands that such relinquishment of all rights includes the relinquishment of all rights to enforce (by lawsuit or otherwise) those copyrights in the Work. Dedicator recognizes that, once placed in the public domain, the Work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived." -- Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA

Am Donnerstag, 12. Januar 2006 19:07 schrieb Wolfgang Jeltsch:

[...]

In addition, it uses this ugly word ( :-) ) "public domain" instead.

I meant: "again", not: "instead".

[...]

Best wishes, Wolfgang

Ashley Yakeley <ashley@semantic.org> writes:

"I, the creator of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide.

"In case this is not legally possible:

"I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law."

That seems very strange. It is actually *two* licences, and it raises an explicit doubt about which one applies in any given jurisdiction. It would be much clearer just to omit the first "public domain" part completely, and use the second licence only. However, it also needs a disclaimer of warranty, and (as others have noted) a note about explicitly quoted material which may have other copyrights and licences. How about: "I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law, or explicitly claimed in the work for some clearly identifiable portion of the work. No warranty of accuracy or fitness-for-purpose is implied for this work." If there is a need for further explanation of the phrase "unless such conditions are required by law", then it could be linked to text such as: For example, laws may prevent you from using this work to defame, libel, or slander any person. If the work quotes material from other sources and explicitly identifies a copyright or licence for that material, you must respect those conditions. Regards, Malcolm

Wolfgang Jeltsch <wolfgang@jeltsch.net> writes:

...

"I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law, or explicitly claimed in the work for some clearly identifiable portion of the work. No warranty of accuracy or fitness-for-purpose is implied for this work."

Does this mean that you have to adhere to the licenses of cited material?

I don't know. In the absence of information to the contrary, I suppose yes. One cannot assume free rights over other people's works. However, if you have legal certainty that you do not need to adhere to a licence in certain situations, that is up to you.

What if you have just a short citation. In Germany, for example, you have "the right to cite" so that you don't have to accept any licenses for small portions of copyrighted work. (I suppose that this is similar in other countries.)

Even if you have the right to cite small portions of copyrighted works, I expect the law might require some form of attribution for those quotations? I don't know. But these are the kind of conditions that cannot be waived by a general grant of unconditional usage. However, my suggested text is meant to imply that if you add a quotation to the wiki, you are the one who is responsible to attribute it correctly, and to identify if it has a more restrictive license, or alternatively that the quotation is sufficiently small that no attribution/license is required. The idea is that the /reader/ can be as free as possible to do what they like with the text, because anything non-free will be clearly identified for them. Thus the burden of identifying non-free material falls on the /author/.

Longer parts of other work should better not included but linked to, shouldn't it?

Indeed. Regards, Malcolm

On 2006-01-12, Malcolm Wallace <Malcolm.Wallace@cs.york.ac.uk> wrote:

However, it also needs a disclaimer of warranty,

Agreed, agreed, agreed. I'd prefer to find a prewritten license that covers this, of course. -- Aaron Denney -><-

I'm sorry this is dragging on so long. It seems public domain is hard, both in the U.S. and in certain European jurisdictions. And people want a disclaimer. I did come across the MIT license, which may be close. <http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php> Here is my non-expert attempt to adapt it, removing the condition, and changing "Software" to "Work": "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining this work (the "Work"), to deal in the Work without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Work, and to permit persons to whom the Work is furnished to do so. "THE WORK IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE WORK OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE WORK."

Hello, Can somebody point me out the exact CVS location of the State Monad implementation that ships with GHC? I am a bit lost in the CVS directory structure ... Related to this, I saw the following thread: http://www.mail-archive.com/haskell@haskell.org/msg17702.html Which seems to hint that there are 2 alternative implementations for the State Monad: one lazy version and one more strict version. Is this correct? What I am really trying to find out is if the version that ships with GHC is the strict version. At least I am inclined to think that, since a program that I expected to terminate is not terminating ... Finally, if there are indeed two versions, can somebody write (or point me out) the two different implementations. Thanks, Bruno

Christian Maeder <maeder@tzi.de> writes:

Bruno Oliveira wrote:

...

Can somebody point me out the exact CVS location of the State Monad implementation that ships with GHC? I am a bit lost in the CVS directory structure ...

fptools/libraries/mtl/Control/Monad/State.hs

Or rather fptools/libraries/base/Control/Monad/ST.hs fptools/libraries/base/Control/Monad/ST/Strict.hs fptools/libraries/base/Control/Monad/ST/Lazy.hs Regards, Malcolm

Am Donnerstag, 12. Januar 2006 23:28 schrieb Ashley Yakeley:

I'm sorry this is dragging on so long. It seems public domain is hard, both in the U.S. and in certain European jurisdictions. And people want a disclaimer.

I did come across the MIT license, which may be close. <http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php> Here is my non-expert attempt to adapt it, removing the condition, and changing "Software" to "Work":

"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining this work (the "Work"),

According to http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php it should read: [...] to any person obtaining *a copy of* this work, Or is leaving out of "a copy of" intended? Anyway, I'm happy that we have a satisfying license now and can contribute to the wiki (again).

[...]

Best wishes, Wolfgang

Am Dienstag, 17. Januar 2006 06:36 schrieb Ashley Yakeley:

In article <200601162208.42179.wolfgang@jeltsch.net>,

Wolfgang Jeltsch <wolfgang@jeltsch.net> wrote:

...

According to http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php it should read:

[...] to any person obtaining *a copy of* this work,

Or is leaving out of "a copy of" intended?

Whoops, no. I think it's safe to leave, though?

I don't know the judical terminology. Maybe, the makers of the so-called MIT license inserted "a copy of" because what you receive on your computer is strictly speaking always just a copy of the work since the actual work lies on the server, the computer of the creator or whatever. Maybe, it's safer to include "a copy of". I think this shouldn't be much of a problem since the current license and the corrected license would roughly be the same so that I cannot imagine some author complaining about a license change in the form of addition of "a copy of". What do others think? Best wishes, Wolfgang

In article <20060111230707.kya880oc8wkk8wgw@webmail.spamcop.net>, ajb@spamcop.net wrote:

G'day all.

Quoting Wolfgang Jeltsch <wolfgang@jeltsch.net>:

...

Yes, BSD might be too "restrictive". So let's put every wiki content under a very permissive license like the one Udo proposed. Opinions?

I agree. Does such a licence already exist?

If not, I'd suggest taking the Creative Commons "by" licence and removing the "by" requirement. Or asking them if they have such a thing already drafted.

What about this one? <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Donate_to_the_public_domain> "I, the creator of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. "In case this is not legally possible: "I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law." -- Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA

Neil Mitchell wrote:

...

We won't be able to include the Haskell 98 Report on the wiki (which is intended to replace the entire haskell.org site) because it has a more restrictive license.

At the same time, we probably don't want people editing the haskell report! As such, a link from the wiki is probably better.

A link from the wiki to where? The wiki is supposed to take over the haskell.org site. But maybe we can still have directories that are not part of the wiki. -- Ashley Yakeley

Neil Mitchell wrote:

...

A link from the wiki to where? The wiki is supposed to take over the haskell.org site. But maybe we can still have directories that are not part of the wiki.

Some of the pages on the Haskell site simply *can't* be moved over to the wiki, Hoogle <http://haskell.org/hoogle/> springs to mind, given that its a server side application.

That's right, there's no point importing content that is already generated from source such as the Haskell Report. And we don't plan to wikify the whole of the GHC site, just some bits of it. Ashley has a point though - we couldn't quote from the Haskell report on the wiki, or indeed quote source code from pretty much anywhere (most code has a non-PD license) if the whole wiki is PD. The wiki-wide license should contain the words "unless explicitly stated otherwise in the content" or somesuch, that way we can give attribution when we quote code. I realise this contradicts some of what has already been said, but there is a conflict: making it easy to use content from the wiki implies a single license, but making it easy to use content from elsewhere on the wiki implies multiple licenses. A good compromise seems to be to have a default license (PD as suggested), but allow it to be overriden, sparingly, by explicit attribution in the content itself. Cheers, Simon

On Thu, 12 Jan 2006, Sebastian Sylvan wrote:

I'm not a copyright lawyer, but is quoting really disallowed when it comes to source code? I know that in most countries it's perfectly legal to quote parts of book and articles, wouldn't the same apply to source code?

That doesn't necessarily allow you to place said code in the public domain. -- flippa@flippac.org The task of the academic is not to scale great intellectual mountains, but to flatten them.