[License-discuss] Request for feedback: public specification licensing

[Giacomo Catenazzi]

On 15.07.2024 18:43, Bruce Perens via License-discuss wrote:

> In particular, you can't copyright function call signatures, variable 
> names, return values, data structures, pretty much anything a software 
> standard would cover.
> 
> Open Source, of course, implements many APIs, standards, protocols, and 
> formats simply because they can't be copyrighted.
> 
> The limitations of copyright and licenses are mostly not understood at 
> all by programmers. This results in a lot of inapplicable terms and 
> often sadly humorous ones (like licenses that attempt to stop war).
> 
> I'm a little surprised that the lawyers on the channel didn't jump to 
> this issue right away.

It is not the point, and for sure Nate know it, else I assume he would 
not "copy" the interface from Harfbuzz.

But a standard is much more then just API and structures. As we learned: 
"nobody can build a network stack just reading RFC, without looking BSD 
code", for this reason "reference implementation" is important (and part 
of the original question), but also text and rationale. And who read 
standard, could really see which one had good writers and which really 
not (so artistic part is necessary not to have a dry standard). And Nate 
was a writer of LWN, so I expect more on good writer team.

We can look at Unicode Standard: the text is much more than just a 
standard, it has a lot of linguistic and stylistic works. For the rest 
we just use the Unicode Database (which it is distributed separately). 
Without such good Unicode Standard text, I doubt Unicode would be so 
loved (and understood), OTOH the "Unicode" of programmers is mainly in 
the dababase and in the Annexes (algorithms).

Also for this case, the boring stuffs are in OpenType specs. Font 
designers interpret it in different ways, so test on the 3 main engines 
is necessary (to check if the "front-end" programmers have the same 
interpretation). Just an assumptions of what Nate is doing, so much more 
than just an interface.

Just my interpretation: Nate is looking much more than just the standard 
interface.

ciao
	cate