On Tue, 2008-12-02 at 21:56 +0000, David Gerard wrote: > 2008/12/2 Adam Jackson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > On Wed, 2008-12-03 at 06:28 +1100, Daniel Stone wrote: > >> On Tue, Dec 02, 2008 at 01:48:31PM -0500, Adam Jackson wrote: > > >> > I don't know what our documentation licensing stance is. MIT would keep > >> > things simple, but I don't know if it's appropriate for docs. > > >> What're our options? GFDL is out as DFSG-incompatible. > > > Yeah, MIT does seem to be a good plan, at least for the non-spec > > documentation. Alan and Mikhail do mention CC-BY, which might be okay > > for spec docs? Would have to check. > > > CC-by is a permissive licence for text. To what extent is it > compatible with MIT, in which directions? > > c.f. the case of mixing MIT, BSD (in its many variations), similar > permissive licenses ... > > How well understood are the implications of MIT as a licence for text? > (c.f. GFDL, which makes less sense the closer you look at it.) > > This level of consideration is worthwhile as licences are a hideous > nightmare and getting it right now is vastly superior to getting it > not quite right now and needing to fix it later.
The FreeBSD documentation license seems to be a straightforward translation of the MIT rights to apply to text: http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-doc-license.html It's more explicit than I think is directly appropriate for X, since much of our documentation source is not DocBook. But. There's a tension here in that you'd like invariant sections so you can say things like "the authoritative version of this doc is here" and point back at the x.org versions, but that runs you right into DFSG-non-free land. I guess the question is what we'd lose by going with an MIT policy (asserted copyright + liability waiver + free modification). I mean, if someone published a buggy version of the protocol spec in a book, it's certainly much easier to address that through publishing _more_ information (like errata on a web page) than by legal injunction. And it's not like there is serious competition out there for the definition of the protocol. The more I read CC-BY 3.0, the less I like it. Section 4c seems to imply that, if we released the protocol doc under CC-BY, you'd be prohibited from including it in a book entitled "World's Greatest Software Engineering Disasters", which I'm pretty sure counts as non-DFSG (and also flatly inappropriate, since oh boy are we ever engaged in pig-lipsticking here). - ajax
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