discuss: Documentation licensing
Subject:
Re: Documentation Licensing
From:
Rick Moen ####@####.####
Date:
6 Apr 2004 19:24:16 -0000
Message-Id: <20040406192412.GS22228@linuxmafia.com>
Obligatory disclaimer: Intelligent people of goodwill frequently differ
over documentation licensing. ;->
Just for the sake of clarity (pro bono publico), and not to be critical:
Quoting Rahul Sundaram ####@####.####
> I think the following licenses are acceptable
> Creative commons share alike
The Creative Commons (hereafter "CC") ShareAlike 1.0 is a forkable licence
that doesn't require attribution (i.e., retaining author credits). If you
actually _didn't_ mean to drop that requirement -- as I suspect was the
case -- then you might have intended to cite CC's Attribution-ShareAlike
1.0 licence, instead.
> Opencontent
Open Content was/is David Wiley's initiative for documentation licensing
at http://www.opencontent.org/ . Wiley published two documentation
licences before shutting down the initiative in 2003 and joining CC as
Director of Educational Licenses because he considered the CC effort
more promising. Those were:
o OpenContent License 1.0 (bizarrely termed "OPL" on account of its
original name: "OpenContent Principles and License") -- a 1998
licence requiring attribution and permitting derivates but forbidding
commercial distribution. In CC jargon, this is thus an
Attribution-NonCommercial licence.
o Open Publication License 1.0 (bizarrely _not_ termed the "OPL") --
a newer licence, permitting commercial usage, that is either forkable
or not depending on whether the copyright holder invokes option
A or B in clause 6. In CC jargon, this is thus either a
Attribution-ShareAlike or NoDerivs licence, depending.
Of Wiley's licences, please note that only Open Publication License 1.0
with the forkable option would be considered OSD-compliant aka DFSG-free.
OpenContent License 1.0 ("OPL") and the other variant of Open
Publication License 1.0 would be considered proprietary.
(Wiley's somewhat contrite about the confusion caused by his mapping the
abbreviation "OPL" non-intuitively to OpenContent License, by the way.)
> GNU FDL
Controversy continues to dog GFDL 1.2 (current version at this writing):
Pretty much everyone agrees that, if applied with any of the several
options for "invariant sections", the result is proprietary licensing
(i.e., licensing that is not OSD-compliant aka DFSG-free). However,
_even_ if used without its invariant-text provisions GFDL 1.2 has
serveral serious problems. I would encourage you to read the summary of
Debian developer analyses at
http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml .
