3 ms·

You should reach out to them and let them know. I don't know what the alternative would be - are there better CC licenses out there? Dual licensing CC+MIT/BSD?

• TAForObvReasons 5y ago
  There are two problems that reasonably explain the decision of only accepting public domain info: licensing and provenance. "Licensing" is hard. The "Open Specifications Promise" [1], which covers a bunch of Microsoft-designed file formats, is merely a covenant not to sue. "Provenance" is tricky. For example, much of the knowledge of the Apple iWork formats were derived by reverse-engineering the source programs and extracting protobuf definitions. Many open source projects have freely copied from each other, making detailed analysis tricky [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Open_Specification_Promise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Open_Specification_P... [2] https://github.com/jazzband/tablib/issues/114 https://github.com/jazzband/tablib/issues/114
  • cxr 5y ago
    > There are two problems that reasonably explain the decision Boy do I hate these kinds of after-the-fact, speculative "explanations"—anachronistic rationalizations that come out of a mental exercise to justify what is by retroactively (and non-authoritatively) trying to invent a plausible why. And if you know the personality and values of the progenitor of the whole thing, then you know that this better-safe-than-sorry deference to hair-splittingly nuanced IP hurdles (that in practice don't really exist) is not the MO. Besides that, requiring public domain/CC0 doesn't solve either of those problems.
  • kortex 5y ago
    > "Provenance" is tricky. For example, much of the knowledge of the Apple iWork formats were derived by reverse-engineering the source programs and extracting protobuf definitions. Many open source projects have freely copied from each other, making detailed analysis tricky I wonder if the Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. ruling helps this in any way. Defining a specification (either with public docs, RE or empirically) of closed format for the sake of reading the data or long-term archival strikes me as emphatically free-use. But I could also easily seeing it ending up patent-troll bait.