On Mon, 2014-06-30 at 09:30 -0400, Aaron W. Hsu wrote:
> What seems more suspicious, though I don't think legally problematic
> from the above wide permission, is to copy the document, and then claim
> copyright over it, and somehow incorporate it as a part of a significant
> commercial endeavor, without citing or referencing the original work and
> trying to pass the copy as your own work.
If someone presented a modified document which still claimed to
be the standard for Scheme while actually saying different things
about the semantics of the language described, that would clearly
be a violation of the license under which the original is offered,
because the original is intended for the use of the Scheme community
and such a document would actively undermine the Scheme community.
Therefore, there IS in fact a license, so it is definitely not
"Public Domain." We are being asked to clarify the license so
that no knowledge of common sense is required to understand what
the license entails.
It's a request that probably makes sense in Lawyerese, and its
intent is probably to get a copy of the license actually translated
into Lawyerese. Unfortunately I know of no reliable way of
translating common sense into that language.
I have in the past advised someone (I'm forgetting whom right now)
that it was entirely okay to use R4RS (which was current at the time)
as the framework or "first draft" of a reference manual for his
particular scheme implementation - modifying the text as necessary
to describe the implemented language in the instance, as opposed to
the standard for the language family -- and, of course, clearly
indicating exactly what instance of the language was being described
as opposed to making the claim to be the standard itself.
I recall advising him that it would be a "Richard" at best to do so
without acknowledging the original document, but I think I agreed
with him at the time that there was no legal requirement to do so.
I believe that's probably still true of the current RNRS too, for
what it's worth.
Ray Dillinger
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