discuss: licence problems
Subject:
Re: [discuss] licence problems
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
24 Sep 2008 09:02:33 +0100
Message-Id: <20080924072146.GE2483@davespc>
On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 04:56:38PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
>
> I personally think TLDP should be _willing_ to accept (new) documents
> under any halfway reasonable free licence ("free" meaning permitting
> reuse for any purpose, and creation/distribution of derivative works.
> Reasonable licences (IMO) include Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0, Creative
> Commons BY 3.0, and Open Publication License 1.0 with no options. It
> also (IMO) includes GPLv2 (maybe), GPLv3 (maybe), new-BSD, and MIT/X.
> (See below.)
>
> I suggest[1] that GFDL 1.2 or later without invariant sections be
> recommend and requested to authors. If authors nonetheless specify a
> reasonable licence that isn't GFDL, I suggest accepting the submission.
It would be nice if all wiki articles were GFDL. This makes it easy
for users to understand what the rules are and anyone that wants to
print them doesn't have to examine many different licenses. I think
the proposal to contact authors and ask them to change the license to
GFDL (no invariant sects.) is a good one. But what about the cases
where you can't find the author (or the cases where the author will
not change the license, or can't because the co-author(s) can't be
located)? In these cases, if the existing license allows modification
they could be added to the wiki. But if the doc has not been
maintained for such a long time that it essentially needs rewriting,
then it might be better to start over from scratch and produce a new
doc using the GFDL license. So I'm proposing that all wiki docs be
GFDL except for cases where it's not feasible.
Of couse, for cases where the author can't be contacted, the proposal
that all docs on the wiki need an author or maintainer mean that such
docs would have to find a new maintainer to get on the wiki. And that
may be hard to do. Thus most all docs on the wiki would likely be
GFDL.
David Lawyer
