new license "Academic Citing License"

Russell Nelson nelson at crynwr.com
Tue Sep 21 23:40:15 UTC 2004


Johannes Kaiser writes:
 > I absolutely agree with your point that there should be no restriction  
 > on use. However, most OSI-approved licenses require reproduction of the  
 > license itself in derived work. What I want is basically the same: You  
 > may do with it whatever you want, as long as you reproduction of a  
 > citation in the derived work, e.g. journal articles. Therefore, I do  
 > not see that your concern applies.

A journal article is not a derived work.  Let's say that your software
produces graphs.  If I use your software -- just use it -- to create
graphs for a journal paper, that's not a derived work.  No part of
your software appears in their paper or any software distributed with
their paper.  You can't put a restriction on the use of your software
that requires them to say "Graphs produced by Kaiserware Graphworks".

And yet your language below implies that if they merely use your
program to help them produce their publication, they have to
acknowledge use of it.

 > I would like to make one of my scientific programs publicly available 
 > as open source. In order to make sure that the program is properly 
 > acknowledged the license should include a condition demanding the 
 > citation of a specific reference publication in all publications 
 > prepared with the help of my program.

Restrictions on use won't fly.

 > Since there seem to be different opinions, it might be good idea to  
 > continue the discussion at license-discuss at opensource.org.

Okay.

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