discuss: new documentation license
Subject:
Re: new documentation license
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
23 Nov 2003 06:08:40 -0000
Message-Id: <20031123060753.GD404@lafn.org>
On Sat, Nov 22, 2003 at 11:52:56PM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Hi
>
> I was looking into the GNU FDL issues in Debian. It seems that Debian wouldnt
> include FDL'ed docs due to its concerns about it. Tabatha suggested OPL which
> I currently use for the LDP FAQ. Note that this is the OPL without
> restrictions. Does this license have any issues that you are aware of?. what
> do you people feel about documentation licenses
I think that LDP needs to create it's own license again. This will take
up a lot of time partly because I would like to see one that will
prevent abuse of documentation. It would prohibit advertising being
displayed online with the documents and have some requirement about
labeling stale versions as such. The vast majority of what one finds
using a search engine are not the latest versions, although the ones
found first may be.
Also, I think that there should be options for our license, one of which
would be to prohibit modification unless the author can't be readily
located or isn't maintaining the doc. It's not easy to put this into a
license.
Debian would probably consider such restrictions to be non-free. But I
just don't think we have time to discuss all this right now. I
personally think that it's more important to try to recruit more people
to help and also to revive LinuxDoc (although the majority doesn't
agree). It would be nice to have an active leader who could work on LDP
full time.
In the past, debates about our license became almost flame wars with
some ad hominem remarks, some directed against me. But I wasn't
proposing the above suggestions. One debate was about a license
proposal to permit changing licenses on derived works without the
permission of the copyright owner by putting various licenses into
classes. Complicated. There were hundreds of posts. And prior to
this, other heated debates were reported about the LDP license. All of
this should be in the history of LDP that someone was writing but I
guess the history was never done.
David Lawyer
