Licence of VO-DML files?

[Markus Demleitner]

Dear Laurent,

On Tue, Nov 03, 2020 at 03:36:24PM +0100, Laurent Michel wrote:
> Being not a lawyer I would say the licence applicable to the VODML
> files should be this of the standards on GitHub ( Creative Commons
> Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
> <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/>. )

Hm -- remember how I argued against CC-BY-SA because it doesn't do
what people think it does ("make people reference us") but causes
problems down the road?  Well, this is such a problem (I had not
expected that to arrive so early).  As they say on
https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software:

  Additionally, our licenses are currently not compatible with the
  major software licenses, so it would be difficult to integrate
  CC-licensed work with other free software.

-- which is why I'm here: I'd like to distribute VO-DML with DaCHS
(which is GPL-3) and get the thing past the piercing eyes of the
Debian ftpmasters who are perfectly aware of the incompatibilities of
CC-BY-SA and the GPL.

Since it seems the CC-BY-SA decision on the document won't be
reversed (and for the documents themselves there's no overriding need
to), we ought to do something for VO-DML files specifically -- or
they'll always been painful when distributing software that embeds
them.

Which, I think, boils down to choosing between CC0 (which is
compatible with the GPL and other sotware licences) or using a
software licence (presumably one of LGPL, MIT, or BSD).  Not doing
anything will be pain later on.

As I said, for simplicity I'd go with CC-0, but I'd be easily swayed.

       -- Markus