Thdl Open Community Software License

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THL Open Community Software License

Contributor(s): David Germano, Than Grove.

Introduction

The THL Open Community License is a free software license. The source code for our software is completely open and public. We hope that others will contribute and build upon what we've done, resulting in better, more useful products. The license was originally based upon the Open Public License (OPL), which is also used by Enhydra. The OPL is a slightly modified version of the popular external link: Mozilla Public License. Also see the external link: Lesser General Public License offered by external link: Enhydra.

The Actual License

THL Open Community License Version 1.0

1. Definitions

This license is a union of the following two parts that should be found as text files in the same place (directory), in the order of preeminence:

  1. This file itself, named
  2. The contents of Open Public License, stating the general licensing

policy of the software.

2. Precedence of the license parts

In case of conflicting dispositions in the parts of this license, the terms of the lower-numbered part will always be superseded by the terms of the higher numbered part.

3. Exhibit A

The contents of this file are subject to the THL Open Community License Version 1.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License on the THL web site (external link: http://www.thlib.org/).

Software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" basis, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific terms governing rights and limitations under the License.

The Initial Developer of this software is the Tibetan and Himalayan Library (THL). Portions created by the THL are Copyright 2001 THL. All Rights Reserved.

Contributor(s): ______________________________________.

4. Exhibit B

This product includes software created by the Tibetan and Himalayan Library (external link: http://www.thlib.org/).

5. Section 3.2 of OPL 1.0

As used in section 3.2 of the OPL "Contact Means" shall mean the email address <a class="safe-contact" href="javascript:linkTo_UnCryptMailto('nbjmup;uimAdpmmbc/jud/wjshjojb/fev');"><img src="/global/images/contact/contact-thl.gif" width="164" height="15" /></a>.

Further notes (not part of license per se)

With this License, you can:

  1. Modify our software, provided the source code for these modifications remains open, and your changes are fully documented.
  2. Use our software in proprietary projects, or build proprietary extensions to the software.

Further, you must:

  1. Notify the THL of your modifications.
  2. Acknowledge our initial contribution, as well as others' later contributions.

As the creators of the software, our role is to keep track of developments and maintain the source code. In fact, however, our goals are much broader than this. In particular, we want to push the use of standard technologies. Both WylieWord and Jskad take advantage of two technologies that have significant potential to bring those in Tibetan computing together.

On the one hand, our software uses Tony Duff's new cross-platform Tibetan Machine Web fonts. These are high-quality TrueType fonts, which are freely available and have been tested and run identically on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux platforms. Documents created on one platform will transfer unproblematically to any other platform. We hope that by encouraging the use of and building infrastructure around these fonts, we can help to promote a dominant and well-supported encoding format, which means less information lost in the long run.

On the other hand, our software implements the THL Extended Wylie Transliteration Standard, our version of Extended Wylie. THL Extended Wylie provides simple ASCII correspondences for all Tibetan characters, including ways to represent Sanskrit stacks as well as punctuation and many special characters. Until Unicode is a viable solution for Tibetan computing, Extended Wylie is the best standard, logical, and platform- independent solution for Tibetan data storage.

Combining these two technologies, we have created a Microsoft Word add-in and a Java application for typing and editing Tibetan, as well as converting back and forth between Extended Wylie and Tibetan Machine Web. Together, this software represents a uniform and consistent solution to Tibetan text input, which is available on any platform and also over the web. Many projects could benefit from this work, as well as customize it to meet their specific needs.

Although our software is open, we want to promote the standards it employs. We don't want our Extended Wylie keyboard to become "just another keyboard". Rather, we hope it will become the Wylie keyboard, one that will become familiar to everyone in Tibetan computing.

This is not to say that we at the THL are allowed to fix the details of the Extended Wylie transliteration system. What we have arrived at represents a carefully thought out system, but certainly not the final answer. It remains a work in progress, and we hope that everyone in Tibetan computing will play a role in shaping the system. We want to hear your feedback, and thus to shape the standard together. What we don't want is a proliferation of multiple, differing implementations.

We hope that you will find this software useful. If you are a software developer, we hope that this license is to your liking, and that you will join us in trying to create a community of standards for Tibetan computing.

Provided for unrestricted use by the external link: Tibetan and Himalayan Library