On Tue, Mar 06, 2001 at 10:31:00PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: Some truly insignificant comments.
> > mpg123 MPEG layer 1/2/3 audio player > > This has a hand-rolled license. Is there a freely-licensed MP3 > player available? I am aware of the patent issues but view them > with scorn. Try mpg321, now in unstable. It doesn't do everything that mpg123 does, but they are working on it. > wdg-html-reference WDGs HTML 3.2, HTML 4, and CSS references > > It is my opinion that standards documents should be freely > licensed, and Debian should probably try to convince the W3C to do > so. First, those aren't the specs. The specs are all available at the W3C website, under the license described here: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/copyright-documents and explained by the FAQ here: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/IPR-FAQ.html#Documents This license is very non-free, however, the odds of that ever changing are zero, and I have to say I agree with them. You wouldn't want someone else publishing a "revised" version of their standards, since that would defeat the purpose of the standard. Even if they called it something different, there would still be a problem. As an example of why this is sometimes true, and accepted by all those we hold high and mighty ( :-) I offer the license of the GPL (which is in main, despite having a much more restrictive license than some of the things in non-free). Really, I don't want to start a flamewar on this. But I don't think that trying to convince the W3C to relicense their specs is a worthwhile use of our time. sam th [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.abisource.com/~sam/ GnuPG Key: http://www.abisource.com/~sam/key
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