discuss: Which Licenses Should LDP Recommend? GFDL
Subject:
Re: Which Licenses Should LDP Recommend? GFDL
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
26 Apr 2001 06:58:51 -0000
Message-Id: <20010425235844.A153@lafn.org>
On Tue, Apr 24, 2001 at 09:03:59AM -0400, David Merrill wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 24, 2001 at 12:38:00AM -0700, David Lawyer wrote:
> >
> > It's my view that none of the above licenses are very good. I think
> > that a license should protect a reader from any obnoxious advertising
> > (especially animated, or alternating with paging). It might also try
> > to prevent the distribution of stale versions by requiring that if you
> > put it on the Internet, stale versions must be labeled as such. None
> > of the above mentioned licenses do this. So perhaps we need to write
> > our own license, or improve on GFDL.
>
> I am not worried about protecting a reader from advertising. The LDP
> will, knock wood, always be around so if they want to get their docs
> without obnoxious advertising they can come to us. If someone else can
> offer enough of an enhanced experience (powerful searching with neural
> interconnect?) that someone will use them rather than us in spite of
> their advertising, more power to them.
The problem is that a lot of people use search engines which are most
likely to get hits on commercial sites instead of LDP sites. This is
due to promotion. Some search engines can be even be paid to give a
high priority to a site. Listing a lot of keywords, etc. helps.
Thus a lot of people may get to a site with ads. The license could
prevent this. I think most volunteer authors don't want ads put into
their work. Now if it's just a modest link to a sponsor, it's not so
bad.
> And I don't think licensing is the solution to the stale versions
> problem. Stale versions come about because people are lazy and not
> mindful. They will still be lazy and not mindful despite any license
> statement. The solution to stale versions is a prominent `latest
> version available from http://' statements at the top, imho.
>
I think such licensing would reduce the prevalence of stale versions
by a huge amount (say to only a few percent of the present situation).
I'm thinking of the case where the license prohibited stale versions
from the start, not the nearly impossible problem of removing the
existing stale versions where (per the licenses) they are doing
nothing wrong.
Such a license would become well known and be a hot news item. It
would require that stale versions be labeled as such. One way to do
this is too keep them in a directory labeled: old, archive (or the
like). Then if a search engine found such a path, one might guess
that it's probably stale. A lot of webmasters,
realizing that they might not be able to keep it current, might just
not carry our docs. It wouldn't affect the 200+ mirror sites and
would probably even increase the number of mirror sites since that's a
way to avoid stale versions. In some cases, webmasters might put new
docs into an ../old/ directory just to be safe.
> > --------------------------GFDL----------------------------------------
> > I've been reading the version 1.1 of GFDL (March 2000) and it's
> > an improvement over version 1.0 but unfortunately it's even more
> > complex. A copy of it is attached so you can read it and see what
> > you think of it. The GFDL attempts to close a number of possible
> > loopholes and may be the best license of the lot. But it also has
> > some problems which I'll now discuss.
> >
> > One problem is that it requires that the full text of the license
> > be supplied with each document. The LDP Author Guide mentions
> > using a
>
> Not exactly true. You must have one copy of the license with each
> repository. One copy for the LDP is okay. One copy in a book of 100
> howtos is okay. But the point is well taken for single document
> prints.
>
> Technically, handing out prints of documents at shows without full
> text is a violation.
So would downloading a HOWTO from the LDP that didn't contain the full
text of the license.
>
> What if at a show we had stacks of each howto we are distributing, and
> a stack of gfdl's. Doesn't that work? We are distributing the gfdl
> with the other docs then, right?
But are the stacks a "collection" in the sense of the license?
Probably not.
[snip]
> > C. State on the Title page the name of the publisher of the
> > Modified Version, as the publisher.
> >
> > Again, who is the publisher?
>
> I believe the authors are legally the publishers. But ianal as always.
> We need to talk to the FSF's lawyers to determine exactly what the
> legal definition is.
The GFDL needs to be revised to make this clear. A license is
something that needs to be clearly written so that it's understandable
to non-lawyers also.
[snip]
> > Another problem is the "Invariant Sections" which can't be modified.
> > They consist of selected "Secondary Sections" defined as:
> >
> > A "Secondary Section" is a named appendix or a front-matter section
> > of the Document that deals exclusively with the relationship of the
> > publishers or authors of the Document to the Document's overall
> > subject (or to related matters) and contains nothing that could fall
> > directly within that overall subject. (For example, if the Document
> > is in part a textbook of mathematics, a Secondary Section may not
> > explain any mathematics.) The relationship could be a matter of
> > historical connection with the subject or with related matters, or
> > of legal, commercial, philosophical, ethical or political position
> > regarding them.
> >
> > I'm not sure if advertising could be put into such an Invariant
> > Section based on the above definition. For a HOWTO on certain
> > hardware, could a commercial firm modify it so as to become an author
> > and then present a "commercial position" which is little more than
> > advertising? I think there should be a time limit for how long an
> > Invariant Section must remain invariant (say 5 years). If a doc is
> > maintained it's copyright every year it's maintained and the copyright
> > thus never expires. So the Invariant Section could still be present
> > hundreds of years later and be quite obsolete.
>
> I suggest that we not attempt to solve all problems with the license.
> This one we can solve in another way.
This license has created a problem by not placing an expiration time
for invariant sections. The expiration time could be say 5 years
after the author of the invariant section stops maintaining the
document. I'm not just concerned about advertising but also about
obsolete political statements (in invariant sections) made a hundred
years previously, etc.
[snip]
David Lawyer
