> --- snip ---
> Here are the acknowledgements from the original pattern
> file:
>
> First release January -86 by Kauko Saarinen,
> Computing Centre, University of Jyvaskyla, Finland
>
> Completely rewritten January -88. The new patterns make
> much less mistakes with foreign and compound words.
> The article "Automatic Hyphenation of Finnish"
> by Professor Fred Karlsson is also referred
>
> 8th March -89 (vers. 2.2), some vowel triples by Fred Karlsson added.
> 9th January - 95: added \uccode and \lccode by Thomas Esser
>
> Patterns may be freely distributed
> --- snip ---
>
> As you should know this is non-free since it does not allow modifications
> and so on.
>
> So when you stricly follow this "license" you were not allowed to create
> a derivative work of it and even if you were the original license is
> non-free.
Mm.. You're probably right.
To clear up the issue, I just gave Kauko Saarinen a quick phone call (luckily
he was still working at the same place as mentioned in the dictionary) and
asked him explicitly if the "Patterns may be freely distributed" statement
covers modifications also. He replied (literal transcription):
"Kyllä saa minun puolestani muokata; hyvä tietää että on käytössä. Olisi
tietysti kiva jos kirjoitetaan tiedostoon jos on muokattu."
...which is in English:
"Sure, I don't mind modifications; nice to know someone uses them. It would
be nice, though, if people wrote a note to the file if they modify it."
Additionally, since one might also interpret line...
"8th March -89 (vers. 2.2), some vowel triples by Fred Karlsson added."
...as saying that Fred Karlsson added the triples himself instead of someone
else encoding triples described in his article, I called prof. Karlsson also
and he confirmed that this interpretion is wrong -- the TeX rules were done
by Saarinen.
> You moreover did not specify what your work is licenses under
That's because I didn't do any creative, copyrighted works -- just
mechanically removed and massaged a few lines here and there and ran it
through a converter. Actually, those removed lines most notably included the
four ones added by Thomas Esser:
\begingroup
\uccode`^^e4=`^^c4 \uccode`^^f6=`^^d6
\lccode`^^e4=`^^e4 \lccode`^^f6=`^^f6
\patterns{
According to my understanding of the copyright law, they don't count as
"substantial creative labour" any more than my changes, but at least now that
they have been removed entirely, nobody can even start to claim he owns any
copyrights anymore, and so the sole copyright owner is now Kauko Saarinen.
Hence, referring to our conversation on the phone, I think we can safely
apply the following diff:
- Patterns may be freely distributed
+ Patterns may be freely modified and distributed
...along with the explanation above, or alternatively stamp some standard,
liberal license such as MIT or Modified BSD on it.
I probably should've gone through this exercise right after the conversion
instead of assuming it's been deemed Free since it's included in several Free
packages already, shame on me.
- Jarno
