From koffice-devel Wed Aug 13 18:49:24 2008 From: Matthew Woehlke Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:49:24 +0000 To: koffice-devel Subject: Re: Office Suite for my new BSD Operating System Message-Id: X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=koffice-devel&m=121865343201581 Jaroslaw Staniek wrote: > Matthew Woehlke said the following, On 2008-08-12 22:26: >> Well... if you want your business letter to be useful as a document >> template, you must give me fairly broad permission to do whatever I like >> with "letter.dot" and derived works. > > No. Yanike mentioned he plans to make templates (using his or other hands) and > provide them for selected audience. The same case applies for other types of > documents (as I still claim we're talking about documents and nothing more; > 'templates' term is technical distincion becouse of control flow that > applications depend on). Ok, let's assume Yanike wants to ensure that only a selected audience can use certain templates. (Re-reading the original post, I'm not sure that's the case, vs. something that I assumed due to apparently reading too much RMS ;-). But that's for elsewhere in the thread, and already posted.) How would this be accomplished? If the template licensing allows me to choose arbitrary licensing terms for my own documents, which are /derived works/, then I can publish a document as e.g. GFDL/CC or even Public Domain. Someone else can then take the document, remove the non-template bits, and republish the template under similar terms (thus "releasing it to a larger audience"). Therefore, we must assume that the licensing on the template imposes licensing restrictions on any document made using that template. IOW, I cannot use the template without giving up rights. Is it legal? Well, probably*. Is it ethical? I don't think so. Do you? (* I'll decline to state my own opinion, as I don't feel I have the extensive knowledge of law that would be needed to offer one. However, I believe that it would be considered permissible according to current legal interpretations and would be upheld in court. I also suspect you could find someone who will argue that it is /not/ legal, and I'm fairly confident what hard-core Free Software advocates - i.e. the sort of people that believe proprietary software should be made illegal - would say about the ethical question.) -- Matthew That said, if this is coming out of your posterior then you should consider your diet. -- Richard Moore, in response to Aaron Seigo's stated source of suggested enum values. _______________________________________________ koffice-devel mailing list koffice-devel@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/koffice-devel