discuss: Limits on doc licensing's significance
Subject:
Limits on doc licensing's significance
From:
Rick Moen ####@####.####
Date:
30 Sep 2008 23:51:53 +0100
Message-Id: <20080930225150.GF1041@linuxmafia.com>
Here are a couple of messages I sent to OSI's licence-discussion mailing
list last month, when documentation licensing came up. The point is to
put in perspective the degree to which documentation licensing matters
-- which is much less than many people think. (Having docs under any
forkable licence is useful, but even its absence is less significant
than is the case with software.)
Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2008 20:47:28 -0700
From: Rick Moen ####@####.####
To: ####@####.####
Subject: Re: Creative Commons
Quoting Raj Mathur ####@####.####
[snip]
> However, I don't see how you can go wrong using one of the CC licences,
> which are the de-facto standard for open document publishing and
> implicitly approved by the OSI by use. Any OSI board member (I used to
> be one) would probably advise you to choose the CC licence that meets
> your needs and go ahead with it.
It should be bourne in mind that most of the CC licences are (by design)
proprietary. That is, some of them intentionally do not grant the right
to create or distribute derivative works, and some of them intentionally
grant that right only for non-commercial re-use.
Applying the OSD as criterion, the current 3.0 licence revisions divide
like this, in my opinion:
Proprietary
-----------
Attribution-NoDerivs
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
Attribution-NonCommercial
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
Open source
-----------
Attribution
Attribution-ShareAlike
Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2008 23:07:00 -0700
From: Rick Moen ####@####.####
To: ####@####.####
Subject: Re: Creative Commons
Quoting Raj Mathur ####@####.####
> OK, I stand corrected -- thanks for the insight, Rick. On the other
> hand, I don't know how far we can go applying criteria for software to
> documents -- what you propose appears reasonable and intuitive, but I'd
> still advise caution when applying the OSD directly to document
> licences.
Very good point (and the original answer still pertains, that OSI simply
doesn't have non-software licensing within its bailiwick in the first
place).
Opinions on documentation licensing tend to be surprisingly contentious
(and I wasn't even particularly thinking of the Debian vs. GFDL affair);
many commentators seem to forget about ways in which documentation tends
to differ fundamentally from software:
o Getting access to the preferred form really isn't very difficult for
a motivated re-user. (We're not talking about contrived DRM/Kindle
scenarios, but rather ordinary documentation -- but even those succumb
to screen snapshots and OCR.) At minimum, the full semantics of the
work are available to inspection, i.e., there's nothing like
software's trait of obscuring through compilation.
o In part because of the above fact, there's very little barrier to
creation of a new, equivalent work if an existing one's terms of usage
become a problem.
o The desire to create a new document as a derivative work borrowing part
of an existing document is relatively rarely felt. (The desire to
update an existing poorly maintained document occasionally does arise.)
o For various reasons of real-world perception, authors are often
concerned that modified variants of their work will make them appear to
have said something they didn't. Software people tend to assume that
this is no more of a problem than it is in software, and yet they are
not correct.
It's often claimed that documentation's licensing must be compatible
with (if not the same as) that of the software it concerns, e.g., for
example code included in the docs -- but that's a pretty contrived
scenario, in my view.
But, to stress again, all of this is outside OSI's ambit.
