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

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

On 10/23/07, John Locke <..hidden..> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Chris Travers wrote:
> >
> > 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 don't see how a license can do either of these.
>
> For #1, I think the critical thing is to make it simple to do so. People
> will contribute if it's easy, if there's a clear, simple way of
> accepting contributions.
>

Obviously licensing is only part of the solution to encouraging
contributions.  Part of this means ensuring that it reaches a large
number of users.  For example, if the manual was removed from Debian
Main, that might be a bad thing :-).

> A BSD-style license may actually discourage some contributions--I think
> people will happily contribute to help the project grow, but if they
> think someone else may take the fruits of their labor, close it up and
> make money off of it, this might prevent them from sharing. Especially
> newer community members who may still over-value intellectual property...

I would note that we are both authors of works we have at least hoped
to get printed (you have your book printed, and I am still in the
final editing stages of a book on a non-IT subject).  I don't know to
what extent you had to get permission for material used in your book,
but I have been through that process for mine (and sources said yes,
while others said no).

If you, as an author, wanted to include some GPL'd documentation in
your book, you could do this by including it in an appendix, verbatim,
and ensuring that it was reasonably independant of the rest of your
work.  Then when the publisher asks you for permission to use this,
you can provide the GPL as that permission without denying them
exclusive rights to your own work.  This would appear to me to be
allowed as mere aggregation under that license (which would of course
also need to be reproduced in another appendix).

>
> For #2, there are a few different scenarios I see:

I am thinking more d)  Create new work incorporating some material
from the official documentation, but in a new form.

I personally don't think that publishers would be interested in
anything else.  And that would be prevented by the GPL but allowed in
a BSD-tyle license.  And it doesn't dilute our position to basically
sell printed copies of the official copies of the printed
documentation.

> If someone takes LSMB documentation, adds a concrete example to
> illustrate how to use that feature, we should be able to insist on
> including that back into our documentation--that's the bargain of free
> software.

Sure.  That would be something that we would like.  However, note that
*practical* ideas are not copyright-worthy, so one could create a
similar example safely, I would think (same issue with the fact that
you can copy generally recipes from cookbooks without fear of
copyright infringement).  At least this is true in any country, like
the US or Canada, which uses an originality standard.

>
> To cover scenario b, it might be worth having a single entity that owns
> the copyright, and have contributors assign copyright to that entity.
> That way other licensing agreements could be arranged, in addition to
> the free license.

That would be required for the scenario I listed as well.   However, I
am not sure what is really gained in this case.

Of course if this were the only change, it might not be sufficient to
be copyrightable on its own.   A collection of such examples, however,
could be included in a separate portion of such a publication without
violating the GPL.

For example, suppose instead, I create a book called "A LedgerSMB Workbook."

Part 1 is a set of lessons with hypothetical examples in an
instruction-oriented order.  Section 1 includes footnotes to relevant
portions of section 2.
Part 2 is the official docs included verbatim with appropriate copyright notices
Appendix A is the GPL with a note that it only applies to section 2.

You give the publisher exclusive rights to section 1.  This seems to
me to be allowed as mere aggregation under the GPL.  Now, nothing
prevents us from coming up with similar examples and including them
inline in the documentation.

> How else do you see having an unrestrictive free license on
> documentation could make the software more widespread?
>

Bt allowing independent documentation to be published which uses
elements of the original documentation but also sufficient originality
to be published in traditional media.

I am not sure what we get out of share alike licenses provided that
collected/compliled works are not restricted.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers