Re: Towards a better license for Mutopia

[Bernd Warken]

On Wed, Feb 14, 2001 at 09:33:52PM +0000, David Chan wrote:
> 
> > nor does any audio output replay the license.
> 
> I don't think that this is neccessary, as long as the midi files are only
> distributed with the copyright notice - but see above.
> 
I was joking about the license text because it seemed to force that the
copyright notice had to be sung in each audio output ;-)

> The tag line is the actual copyright notice - I believe it would be
> fraudulent to modify it in Berne Convention countries.  But I Am Not A
> Lawyer.
> 
If thou art a believer thou shalt be eaten.  So I do not believe.

> > The GNU Free Documentation provides the concept of invariant sections,
> > which would fix this flaw.
> 
> But I think there's a lot else wrong with the FDL for music, due to many
> ways which music differs from documentation - and, BTW, I think RMS would
> agree; see his comment to this list in
> <http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg01905.html>:
> 
That's not quite right.  RMS was talking about the Open Content License.
That was not a GNU copyleft.  The GNU FDL was created to overcome the
dangerous points in the Open Content License (being highly deprecated
today).

OTOH, the FDL is perfect for protecting a Mutopia music as a document,
i.e. the lilypond source of the piece and the readable output in every
form by making the tagline an invariant section.

> RMS> I think that we should design a license (or more than one) for free
> RMS> music.  The two possibilities are copyleft and non-copyleft.
> RMS> In order to do this properly, though, we need to work with a lawyer.
> 
> I always knew it would need a lawyer to
> design a good copyleft license, but I thought it would be possible for us
> to manage a BSD-style one without a lawyer.  However, you appear to have
> found potential ambiguities in the first six lines.  I think maybe we
> should take up RMS's offer. Does anyone else agree with this?

I strongly agree.

> [BTW Mutopia is not an official GNU project, though Lilypond is].

Then, why should I contribute to Mutopia?  It shouldn't be too hard
to make it a GNU project.

Bernd Warken <address@hidden>