PBCore licensing?
A discussion at Drupal Groups pertains to development of a Metadata module, possibly incorporating PBCore. The thing is, PBCore is currently licensed under a Creative Commons License, not a GPL which would be required for a Drupal distributed module. Which raises the question: How easy would it be to place PBCore and its documentation under a GNU GPL license? Doing so would be in the interest of the PBCore community, and I would think in the interest of CPB which funded development of the PBCore standard. Feedback would be appreciated!
Comments:
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Hi Jack,
I think that releasing PBCore under an additional license, like GPL, could only be done by its copyright holder, CPB.
Dave
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Right…and surely CPB is listening to this conversation.
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I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but:
I still think it is not necessary to care about PBCore’s licensing terms for these sorts of situations.
As I understand US copyright law, software which adheres to the PBCore standard simply can not be considered a derivative work of the standard itself[*]. So the permissions which one might need to redistribute the standard are simply not relevant.
Furthermore, even if one did consider the license of PBCore to be relevant, it is not necessarily the case that PBCore should be licensed under the GPL in order to be included in a GPL-licensed work; the FSF publishes a list of Free Software licenses, many of which are compatible with the GPL.
[*] Exceptions to this would be if you were writing software which somehow used the XSD or otherwise directly included large parts of the specification, for example as help text.
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