Re: BSD licence

[Jeroen Vermeulen <jtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

luca (ᴉ) innurindi wrote:

> Good, so the upstream translations remain with their own license, but
> what do you think to do in the cases where an user uploads them after the automatic
> import in Launchpad because they weren't complete at that time?

Uploading them again, but as "published."  AFAICS that will fix it.


> > [...]
> > So, while we do understand there are some risks, we feel they are very
> > low. 
>
> Whty do you think so? IMHO I see nothing that prevents someone from
> profiting from this license. Everyone registered in Launchpad can export the pos and
> distribute them with hia own license.

That's possible, but we also asked ourselves: what's to stop a 
proprietary project from basing their translations on (for example) 
GPL'ed ones they find on the Internet, and publishing the "free" parts 
separately from their proprietary binary-only application?  Or to set up 
a pointless BSD-licensed project that happens to use the same 
translations as their proprietary application?  It's more work, we do 
see that, but it can be done.  A license by itself doesn't stop it.

What limits the problem in practice IMHO is the difference between 
programs.  There are many strings that come back again and again, but 
there are also many strings that don't.

The more a string comes back, the more likely it is to be of use to 
another project (which may be proprietary) but also, the less weight 
it's likely to carry when you compare translations for copyright 
purposes.  The most popular strings are all short, and many of them are 
dictated by style guides and such.  Nobody can "monopolize" those(*), 
and anybody will be able to translate those the same way regardless of 
license.

(*) With one possible exception: somebody seems to have translated Quit 
to Dutch as "Native American."  That--how do I say this--would not have 
occurred to me.  :)  I hope it's just a fuzzy match.


Jeroen