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

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

Hi Joshua;

On 10/23/07, Joshua D. Drake <..hidden..> wrote:

> Here is the deal. I don't like the idea of someone being able to close
> and print the ledgersmb documentation. It is really that simple and
> thus I don't think the BSD license is a good thing here.

What exactly do you have in mind as a concern?   How would it harm the
project?  Obviously if there is a concern we should hear about it.

BTW, I do have one concern (and we may want to allow the GPL for
secondary areas of documentation, such as accounting how-to's etc):
If publishers take portions of our work and publish it but only
include areas relating to general accounting, then we do not get any
benefit from releasing the documentation in this format.  If it is
used instead in a reference for LedgerSMB, then we benefit greatly by
getting great advertising.

Perhaps we should also have a policy of accepting non-product-specific
tutorials under the GPL or similar license.  And fir reasons I
outlined earlier, developer documentation derived from POD may need to
be GPL if there are objections from authors.

>
> I like Open Pub (we could remove the clauses if you like) because it is
> simple and to the point.

That is an option that we can discuss.  However if there are other
problems with the license from an Free/Open Source perspective, this
might be an issue.


> I am not really advocating one way or the other if you really want to
> BSD it, go for it, you wrote most of it :)
>
Part of the question is how do we:
1)  Encourage contributions to documentation and
2)  Leverage that documentation to make the software more widespread.

I would say that any concerns you have weigh these and I think we
should hear them more fully ;-)

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers