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

[John Locke <..hidden..>]

Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> MJ Ray <..hidden..> wrote:
>
>   
>>> Which Creative Commons license were you thinking?
>>>       
>> Creative Commons licenses are complicated and contain lawyerbombs -
>> things which are vague and/or confusing and/or CC has ignored requests
>> to explain.  I don't see the benefit over a BSD-style documentation
>> licence if that's what's wanted.
>>
>>     
> 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.
>   

I tend to agree with Joshua, I don't see why you would want to give a
publisher carte blanche permission to take your work, do whatever they
want with it, and sell it without giving anything back. I think the
basic bargain in GPL (v2) is fair, and the further up the stack you get
(documentation, training, templates) the further away you get from the
basic library code that makes sense to license under BSD terms...

I haven't looked that carefully at the various documentation licenses,
but for CC, I tend to go with the by-sa version (Attribution- Share
Alike), allowing commercial re-use but preserving the license on
re-distribution. Sounds like the overall consensus here would just be
the attribution license.

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

Yow. Just read the Open Publication license... seems to be even more
fluffy than CC... "Good Practice Recommendations", "strongly
recommended"--these do not sound like enforceable provisions... What are
they doing in a license? Seems like the license should either require
licensees to do something, or not. -1 on that.
> 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 :)
>   

Agreed...

Cheers,

-- 
John Locke
"Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems"
published by Charles River Media, June 2004
http://www.freelock.com