XSD licences?

[Dave Morris]

I agree with Markus.

These files should have a licence, and this is probably the best 
solution.

-- Dave

--------
Dave Morris
Research Software Engineer
Wide Field Astronomy Unit
Institute for Astronomy
University of Edinburgh
--------

On 2020-11-03 12:21, Markus Demleitner wrote:
> Dear GWS, dear TCG,
> 
> (GWS because you've traditionally been something like a steward of
> our XML schema use)
> 
> I've got a problem in that I'm trying to get my DaCHS publication
> package into Debian main and hence need to be clear on the licences
> of the files I'm distributing.
> 
> And DaCHS really can hardly live without local copies of our XML
> schemas; for instance, it validates registry records quite regularly,
> and it'd suck if it had to hit ivoa.net ~ five times every time it
> did that[1].
> 
> Hence, it would be great if we could agree on a licence for our XSDs.
> Which gives rise to the next problem: The XSDs don't even have a
> copyright holder.  I'm rather sure the holders of the copyright (in
> the German jurisdiction: people who did non-trivial work on the
> schema files) would happily transfer it to the IVOA (for what I've
> written I would), but copyright transfers are a horror and don't even
> work in my jurisdiction).
> 
> So... can we simply say that our schema files are distributed under
> CC-0?  The cool thing is that we can do this without holding the
> copyright; on the other hand, we'd of course have a problem if one of
> the authors suddenly claimed their copyright and didn't agree with
> the non-licence.  But again, I think it's fairly safe to assume that
> won't happen.
> 
> To do the CC0 thing to an extent that I could hold my case against
> the Debian ftpmasters (who suspiciously eye all the files they're
> asked to distribute), I *think* it would be marginally enough to
> have, as on the RDF repo (http://ivoa.net/rdf), a statement like
> 
>   IVOA XML schema files are made available under CC-0 by the IVOA
>   Executive Committee [or someone else: the TCG?  the GWS WG?].
> 
> near the foot of https://ivoa.net/rdf/.  "CC-0" would href
> http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.
> 
> Once that's done, we could further and add and XML comments like
> 
>   <filename> – IVOA XML schema for X
> 
>   Written 2003-2020 by many authors within the IVOA community.
> 
>   This file is made available by the IVOA under the CC0
>   Public Domain Dedication,
>   http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
> 
> to the individual files -- but that's a lot more work, in particular
> because we would need to track down all the various sources of the
> schema files, perhaps re-upload, and so on.  But as I said, I don't
> think I really need that for the Debian upload.  So, I suppose that
> could happen as the XSDs get reviewed over time.
> 
> 
> So... can I have CC0 XSDs?  Pleeeaaaaase?
> 
>           -- Markus
> 
> [1] Where at least DaCHS wouldn't trigger the google analytics that
> still hurt me every time I notice they're still on ivoa.net, so at
> least it wouldn't be *that much* of a privacy issue.