Proposal: License Change for Manual And Standardization of Licenses for Official Docs

["Chris Travers" <..hidden..>]

Hi all;

When I orignally wrote the document which would become the LedgerSMB
manual, I licensed it under the GNU Free Documentation License.  Since
then I have received a number of complaints regarding the licensing
terms of the manual.  In general there seem to be a number of concerns
that it might not be the right license for our technical document.

I am therefore proposing that we change the license to a slightly
modified version of the Free BSD License.  If there is a general
concensus that this should go forward, then I will begin auditing
contributions and contacting contributors to see if we can get the
license terms for contributions relaxed.

While this may have one (possibly minor) drawback in that the
documentation would be released under a more permissive license than
it is currently, and so may be an issue for some people on various
grounds, I believe that this would actually be a good thing for the
following reasons:

1)  It would avoid the temptation to use invariant sections as
personal soap-boxes (the great example of this is the forced inclusion
of the GNU Manifesto in the EMACS manual).

2)  Relaxing the documentation license terms would allow other
publishers to include excerpts from our documentation with the only
requirement being that they must preserve attribution.  If this
happens, it will only advertise our software.

3)  The license will be shorter, and easier to understand for everyone.

My proposed license text is:
Copyright 2005-2007 The LedgerSMB Project. All rights reserved.
[Maintainer may list additional copyright separately]

Redistribution and use in source (the preferred form for editing, for
example SGML DocBook) and 'compiled' forms (SGML, HTML, PDF,
PostScript, RTF and so forth) with or without modification, are
permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

   1.      Redistributions of source code (for example, SGML DocBook)
must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and
the following disclaimer as the first lines of this file unmodified.
   2.      Redistributions in compiled form (transformed to other DTDs
or formats) must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of
conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or
other materials provided with the distribution.

THIS DOCUMENTATION IS PROVIDED BY THE LEDGERSMB DOCUMENTATION PROJECT
"AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT
LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR
A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE FREEBSD
DOCUMENTATION PROJECT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL,
SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT
LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE,
DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY
THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT
(INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE
OF THIS DOCUMENTATION, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.