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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: A call for open source DTDs
 Let me elaborate a little on the problem. Let us suppose we have a DTD for plumbing. This DTD is copyright 1998 International Plumbers Association. Can I legally place the DTD is an XML document of my own creation? The answer is no. That would be the same as including an entire poem or other work in my document rather than quoting a part of it. Can I place the DTD in a separate file on my web server and reference it like this: <!DOCTYPE document SYSTEM "http://sunsite.unc.edu/xml/plumbing.dtd"> Again, legally, the answer is no. I cannot legally place the copyrighted document on my server any more than I can copy a copyrighted HTML file from another web site onto my own. I can, however, do this: <!DOCTYPE document SYSTEM "http://www.iap.org/xml/plumbing.dtd"> This relies on the International Association of Plumburs not changing the URL of the plumbing DTD, not changing the DTD itself, and maintaining a web server that's fast and accessible independently of the state of my web server. And it completely fails for offline documents. So this isn't a good solution. Is open source a solution? Maybe, especially if the DTD is external to the document. However, standard open source licenses like the GPL are problematic because they would seem to imply that if the DTD is included with the document itself, then the entire document must be open source. They are one file, after all. Not even Richard Stallman tries to make all programs compiled with gcc, open source. Neither should using an open source DTD taint the document the DTD validates. So if we want open source we need a new kind of open source license that's clearer about the distinction between DTDs and documents, even though they may be present in the same file. The simplest solution is to simply declare that the DTD is in the public domain. This works well with existing systems and allows anyone to use the DTD any way they need to. The only potential downside I see to this is that there may be some standardization problems if people are allowed to change the DTD willy-nilly. Long-term I suspect we'll develop some standard licensing language that allows unlimited reuse, but only if the name is changed, perhaps something like Perl's artistic license where you can do anything you want with it as long as you don't call it Perl. In any case, the main thing I want to bring up is to make sure DTD authors think about these things when writing copyright statements. If people are going to use your DTD, they absolutely must be able to republish it. Without special permission, standard copyright prevents that. +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@s... | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | XML: Extensible Markup Language (IDG Books 1998) | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764531999/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://sunsite.unc.edu/javafaq/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://sunsite.unc.edu/xml/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...) 
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