What is the license of the FoLiA data format?

proycon / folia

FoLiA: Format for Linguistic Annotation - FoLiA is a rich XML-based annotation format for the representation of language resources (including corpora) with linguistic annotations. A wide variety of linguistic annotations are supported, making FoLiA a useful format for NLP tasks and data interchange. Note that the actual Python library for processing FoLiA is implemented as part of PyNLPl, this contains higher-level tools that use the library as well as the full documentation, validation schemas, and set definitions

http://proycon.github.io/folia/

GNU General Public License v3.0

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What is the license of the FoLiA data format? #103

Closed luutuntin closed 2 years ago

luutuntin commented 2 years ago

Hi Maarten,

I am citing the FoLiA format in my paper, which requires its license information. I suppose that license must be different from the GNU General Public License v3.0 of the GitHub source code. But I cannot find it in your documentation. Can you give me a hint?

Best, Alex

proycon commented 2 years ago

Hi Alex, the format and specification itself is also just GPL v3

luutuntin commented 2 years ago

One anonymous reviewer of my paper mentioned that a data format cannot be licensed under the GNU GPL (without further elaboration). These Wikipedia articles seem relevant:

Should I say that FoLiA is an open file format, implemented by open (GPL v3) source code?

proycon commented 2 years ago

Yes, we're definitely an open file format, so the way you formulated it sounds fine to me. The specification and documentation is all generated by GPLv3 code, so technically anybody is free to fork it and do with it whatever they want (preserving the license). I kind of see what the reviewer meant but never gave that too much thought yet (and nobody asked before). As an open format, people may even write FoLiA parsers and serialisers, etc, that are not GPLv3 (even proprietary ones if the code is not directly derived, as much as I'd dislike that).

luutuntin commented 2 years ago

Thank you.