Re: wsdl test files and licensing

[David Kastrup]

Alex Harsanyi <address@hidden> writes:

> We have a test suite which has about 11 WSDL documents from different
> providers saved locally.  They are used to ensure that soap-client.el
> can parse real-world WSDL documents.  None of these documents have any
> copyright notice on them, except for Debbugs.wsdl and another one
> which has an "All Rights Reserved" notice.

Well, it's obviously up to Richard and/or the FSF copyright clerk to
give any definite statement.  Basically, the "All Rights Reserved"
notice is redundant since that is the default by law.

It would be my guess that Richard would in this case be fine with a
"copyright disclaimer" as we are basically talking about samples rather
than maintained software: we don't get throown into a loop by ripping
any of them out: that can be done immediately without incurring
additional labor.

One would mail the legal departments/representatives of all known
sources with a polite request for giving such a disclaimer in order to
be able to include their WSDL documents in a test-suite which has the
side effect that their web sites will be one of several that are
guaranteed to work well.  One weeds out the refusals and looks for
suitable replacements, rinse and repeat.

Again: I am just second-guessing Richard here: anything definitive must
come from him or the copyright clerk.  It's just what I consider most
likely.

> I wasn't sure if these documents can be distributed at all, so I kept
> the test suite private, instead of adding it to the public repository
> which hosts soap-client.el.

That's perfectly smart, but it would be nice if we could get a public
test suite together.  And that will more likely than not requiring
mailing the respective people for disclaimers and/or recreating relevant
stuff from scratch when the respective permissions cannot be acquired.

-- 
David Kastrup