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

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

I have decided to reply to this in more detail,

On 10/20/07, John Hasler <..hidden..> wrote:
> Chris Travers writes:
> > 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).
>
> Not that I have any objection to the change, but note that your proposed
> license would not prevent the addition of invariant sections (or changes
> and additions under pretty much any terms the author of the changes wants
> to use).

I guess I should say more specifically what I am trying to prevent.

The GFDL allows for invariant sections without changing the license as
a document as a whole.   This allows the illusion of free
documentation.  By going with a more permissive license, nothng
prevents authors from adding invariant sections, but they cannot apply
the license we as a project have chosen to them.  In essence invariant
sections become less usable for the projec but no less usable for
people who, say, publish printed documentation.

In short this license provides greater incentive for us to keep the
documentation unambiguously Free and Open (all sections) and provides
greater reusability elsehwere with credit being granted to our
project.  I know some producers of other documentation for the project
who would rather not use the GFDL.

THere is one issue though that might limit our ability to do this for
*all* project documentation.  Our developer documentation and man
pages are likely to be derived from POD which is inline in the code.
This makes our developer doucmentation a derivative work of the actual
source code files themselves.  If current contributors does not want
to relicense the POD to us under the appropriate license, we could be
forced to use the GPL for the developer documentation.

>
> > My proposed license text is: Copyright 2005-2007 The LedgerSMB Project.
>
> Is The LedgerSMB Project a corporation?  If not I don't believe that it can
> own a copyright.

I actually think that the core team should register the copyrights to
the software and documentation.  It is not expensive, and would
provide us with a fair bit or protection down the road.

So something like:
Copyright 2005-2007  Chris Tavers, Seneca Cunningham, Jason Rodrigues,
Joshua Drake, Joshua Berkus, Christopher Murtagh and others.

Does this help?
Best Wishes,
Chris Travers