John Cowan wrote: > You keep ignoring the QPL and the Artistic License, ah, constructive help is so refreshing ;) thank you. someone did mention the QPL license earlier. I looked at it, but my concern is that it uses the word "software" everywhere. I was looking at licensing a MSWord document or PDF file. If that format is not considered "software", then the entire license might not apply. I am not a lawyer, so I'm not sure if its a problem. There's also the notion of "patches" in QPL, and that could be widely interpreted when applied to a Word document. or the license might be voided if Word doesn't allow "patches" in the "software" sense. Even though there might be a document based way of doing "ammendments" or something similar. if its not a problem, then I'll just use QPL. (ok, and that bit at the end saying "Disputes shall be settled by Oslo City Court." created visions of long flights to snow covered court rooms just to straighten out a legal issue.) brrrr... ;) I've considered writing the document as a perl program, such that the program dumps the text to the screen. And then license the program as QPL. That might be an option, but then I lose any formating information and images that may have been in the Word document. as far as Artistic License goes, it has the same problems by refering to "software". Plus, isn't it pretty much agreed that it's a shaky license? I know they're intending on rewriting it for Perl 6. > and everyone else keeps ignoring the fact that > you mean to allow patches. oh, you've noticed that too. ;) given OSI's approval process is so long, I don't think a new license would get approved in time to be of use to me anyway. which is pushing me in the direction of writing it as a perl program of some sort, and then licensing the program under QPL. I'll just have to deal with any images and formating issues somehow. perl/tk can handle jpegs, I think, so that will fix that problem. and the Text widget can create columns, etc. It'll just be a whole bunch of extra work to do the conversion. Also, not everything in Perl/Tk had a print method, (at least when I was contributing code to the Perl/Tk effort) which means it might be some hoop jumping to get a printable version of the document. I don't know if all the perl GUI widgets have print methods now or not. That might have changed. And all of this just because there's no license for Word documents, PDF's, etc. Rather than simply have a documentaion license, I have to do a bunch of work to make my document look like software so I can license it with an OSI approved license. It just seems odd to me. Greg London -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3