discuss: new documentation license
Subject:
Re: new documentation license
From:
Tabatha Marshall ####@####.####
Date:
23 Nov 2003 07:33:30 -0000
Message-Id: <1069572782.8603.79.camel@mysticchild>
On Sat, 2003-11-22 at 22:07, David Lawyer wrote:
> 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.
I agree with you there. I have a document right now from 1996 - the
Shadow Password HOWTO - whose author can't be contacted, which has had a
brief review. I've already fruitlessly searched Google and had bounced
mail from associates who were acknowledged in the document. This
becomes a question of whether to allow someone to take it over, or
remove it if it can't be maintained because of license restrictions
(this particular one was a handcrafted license, which may be subject to
interpretation, and we may be able to save the doc). If it could be
maintained, someone would need to look at the review and make some
revisions to update it, since it is several years old.
> 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.
If Debian has suggestions for what to do with documents whose authors
disappear, I'd love to hear them. I'd rather see them contribute to
solving the problem than just stating what they don't like. I'm not
disagreeing with their reasoning, but it certainly doesn't answer the
question of what to do in such a situation.
If LDP was incorporated I'd gladly go on board full time. I'll stick
around anyway. I'm hard to get rid of once I find a worthy cause. :D
> 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.
I'd support a modified LDP license. If it read similarly to the OPL,
and had some provision for authors who disappear, I think most authors
would find it acceptable, and maybe make more of an effort to keep on
top of their own work (I'm referring to the really outdated stuff). A
link to the LDP license could be included in the copyright notice, which
is a major space saver.
Maybe if we can set aside previous historical conversations and avoid
flame wars we could effectively come up with a license that meets
everyone's needs.
Tab
--
Tabatha Marshall
Web: www.merlinmonroe.com
Linux Documentation Project Review Coordinator (http://www.tldp.org)
Linux Counter Area Manager US:wa (http://counter.li.org)
