Treaty of Babel doc license?

[Andrew Plotkin]

Did we ever stick a license on the Treaty of Babel document?

Someone emailed me asking about permission to reformat IF spec documents
into other formats. I have explicit licenses on the Glk and Glulx
documents (CC-BY-NC-SA), but I can't find a Babel one.

Their project web site is https://github.com/tajmone/polygen-docs . I
don't know if this project has a whole lot of value to add, but as a
general thing, it would be good to say what the license is.

My impulse is to add CC-BY-NC-SA to the doc. How does everybody feel about
that?

--Z

--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*

[Tristano Ajmone]

Ciao!

Thanks for allowing me to join the list. I'm Tristano Ajmone from Italy, an IF

fan and author:

https://github.com/tajmone/Archivio-AT-Tristano

I'm also the person mentioned by Andrew, who wrote him a while ago asking about

the license terms for the Treaty document.

> Their project web site is https://github.com/tajmone/polygen-docs . I 

> don't know if this project has a whole lot of value to add, but as a 

> general thing, [...]

@Andrew, the "polygen-docs" link that I had provided was just an example of the

use I had in mind for the document, i.e. to convert it to markdown via pandoc

and custom macros in order to allow converting it to a styled HTML5 document

and other formats — either that or AsciiDoc. So, the provided link was nothing

more than an example, not related to IF in any way.

What I wanted to do was to convert to markdown/AsciiDoc a number of IF technical

docs (specs and standards) and publish them on GitHub in order to have:

1. Light markup source of the documents which could be used to convert to various

   formats by anyone wishing to use them in a project (book or otherwise).

2. Make all those docs viewable via a GitHub Pages website, in nicely formatted

   HTML5 (with syntax highlighting) and cross links between the docs.

The project has been on wait for a while because I couldn't find any license

terms for the Treaty (unlike the other specs docs, like Glulx, Glk, Z-Machine,

etc.).

> [...] it would be good to say what the license is. 

> My impulse is to add CC-BY-NC-SA to the doc. How does everybody feel about 

> that? 

That would be great. Creative Commons license terms allow porting contents to

other formats (eg, form plain text to HTML or PDF), so it would allow to quote

and reproduce portions of the Treaty in other documents or books (even the whole

treaty), with dure credits, etc.

The current lack of license terms is quite problematic for it prevents reusing

the Treaty document at all.

Thanks,

Tristano (Turin)

[Andrew Plotkin]

On Tue, 30 Oct 2018, Tristano Ajmone wrote:

> What I wanted to do was to convert to markdown/AsciiDoc a number of IF
> technical
> docs (specs and standards) and publish them on GitHub in order to have:
>
> 1. Light markup source of the documents which could be used to convert to
> various
> formats by anyone wishing to use them in a project (book or otherwise).
> 2. Make all those docs viewable via a GitHub Pages website, in nicely
> formatted
> HTML5 (with syntax highlighting) and cross links between the docs.
>
> The project has been on wait for a while because I couldn't find any license
> terms for the Treaty (unlike the other specs docs, like Glulx, Glk,
> Z-Machine,
> etc.).
>
>> [...] it would be good to say what the license is.
>> My impulse is to add CC-BY-NC-SA to the doc. How does everybody feel
>> about that?
>
> That would be great. Creative Commons license terms allow porting
> contents to other formats (eg, form plain text to HTML or PDF), so it
> would allow to quote and reproduce portions of the Treaty in other
> documents or books (even the whole treaty), with dure credits, etc.
>
> The current lack of license terms is quite problematic for it prevents
> reusing the Treaty document at all.

I'll see if I can contact the signers not on this list and make sure they
have no objections.

[Andrew Plotkin]

On Tue, 30 Oct 2018, Tristano Ajmone wrote:

> 2. Make all those docs viewable via a GitHub Pages website, in nicely
> formatted
> HTML5 (with syntax highlighting) and cross links between the docs.

Just to let you know, I have a general plan to set up a spec.ifarchive.org
site with all the spec documents, or links to them.

Don't let this stop you -- I don't have a schedule for this plan.

[Andrew Plotkin]

On Fri, 2 Nov 2018, Andrew Plotkin wrote:

>>> [...] it would be good to say what the license is.
>>> My impulse is to add CC-BY-NC-SA to the doc. How does everybody feel
>>> about that?
>>

Done. See https://babel.ifarchive.org/ .

[Tristano Ajmone]

Ciao Andrew,

sorry for the late reply...

> Done. See https://babel.ifarchive.org/ .

Thanks a lot! I really appreciate that.

> Just to let you know, I have a general plan to set up a spec.ifarchive.org
> site with all the spec documents, or links to them.
>
> Don't let this stop you -- I don't have a schedule for this plan.

That's great news! I had already converted most of the lastest Glulx and Glk
specs to pandoc markdown, locally (for my own personal use only). If it might
be of any help to you I can send the source files to you via email. Of course,
you can then use pandoc to convert them to whatever format you feel more
confortable working with.

Please, keep me updated with your poject; I love woking on documentations and
if I could contribute in any way I'd love to. Currently I'm working on porting
the Alan official documentation to AsciiDoc:

- https://github.com/alan-if/alan-docs

I have created three syntax definition for Alan 3 in order to allow syntax
highlight of Alan source code with Highlight, Highlight.js and HLXSL. For the
IF specs project I had in mind, I was hoping to create syntax definitions to
highlight Glulx opcodes, inform 6/7, and other IF langs too. The whole idea is
to create a publicly shared repository with IF specs that can be converted to
beautified HTML for web and local consumption.

Thanks again!

Tristano

[Andrew Plotkin]

On Sun, 4 Nov 2018, Tristano Ajmone wrote:

> That's great news! I had already converted most of the lastest Glulx and Glk
> specs to pandoc markdown, locally (for my own personal use only). If it might
> be of any help to you I can send the source files to you via email.

That's useful, thanks.

(None of them existed as markdown originally. The Glk and Glulx documents
started in a custom markup format which I invented before markdown
existed. There's no reason for that to exist any more, of course.)

[Tristano Ajmone]

I've sent you the markdown sources via private email as a zipped attachment.

I actually sent them yesterday, but I think gmail might have blocked the email due to the

ZIP attachment, so I've sent them again today using another account.

Hope you got them.

[Andrew Plotkin]

On Mon, 5 Nov 2018, Tristano Ajmone wrote:

> I've sent you the markdown sources via private email as a zipped attachment.

I got them (both), thanks.