Licenses for open source docs (was: Migrating contents wikis --> new docs)
On Fri 2021-08-06, Richard Brown wrote:
I also think the GPLv3 is a bloody stupid license for use for documentation.
What is your personal preference / recommendation to open source projects when it comes to licensing documentation?
Regardless though, your point is irrelevant to the topic at hand - the wikis license and doc.openSUSE.orgs license are different with competing clauses
Sadly the FSF has done a bad job keeping their key licenses compatible. For example in GCC we've been suffering from GPLv3 vs GFDL which has made it unnecessarily hard to move documentation snippets (such as descriptions for command-line options) between code to docs. From a practical perspective I am wondering whether having the same license for all/most aspects of a project - code, docs, web pages,... might be best? Gerald
On 8. Aug 2021, at 13:19, Gerald Pfeifer <gp@suse.com> wrote:
On Fri 2021-08-06, Richard Brown wrote:
I also think the GPLv3 is a bloody stupid license for use for documentation.
What is your personal preference / recommendation to open source projects when it comes to licensing documentation?
Regardless though, your point is irrelevant to the topic at hand - the wikis license and doc.openSUSE.orgs license are different with competing clauses
Sadly the FSF has done a bad job keeping their key licenses compatible.
For example in GCC we've been suffering from GPLv3 vs GFDL which has made it unnecessarily hard to move documentation snippets (such as descriptions for command-line options) between code to docs.
From a practical perspective I am wondering whether having the same license for all/most aspects of a project - code, docs, web pages,... might be best?
I would lean the same way, were it not also a factor that large distribution projects typically need to also document things previously documented upstream. The “aggregation with independent works” clauses of the GFDL are a godsend in such a case and I am not aware of any comparable clauses in GPLv2 (as used by openSUSE) for example. So because of that factor, the GFDL wins out over any code centric Free license in my eyes.
Gerald
On 8/8/21 8:48 PM, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
On Fri 2021-08-06, Richard Brown wrote:
I also think the GPLv3 is a bloody stupid license for use for documentation.
What is your personal preference / recommendation to open source projects when it comes to licensing documentation?
Regardless though, your point is irrelevant to the topic at hand - the wikis license and doc.openSUSE.orgs license are different with competing clauses
Sadly the FSF has done a bad job keeping their key licenses compatible.
For example in GCC we've been suffering from GPLv3 vs GFDL which has made it unnecessarily hard to move documentation snippets (such as descriptions for command-line options) between code to docs.
From a practical perspective I am wondering whether having the same license for all/most aspects of a project - code, docs, web pages,... might be best?
Personally when it comes to some forms of docs such as code examples and other similar things that may be used by developers directly the only actually useful license is MIT. To make life easier if i'm not writing detailed textbooks etc then i'll tend to just leave my docs MIT which kinda works if you write the doc and the code at the same time. Which I know is slightly different from your use case. I guess the following is another good reason for openSUSE to use the GFDL Meanwhile, the GFDL has clauses that help publishers of free manuals make a profit from selling copies—cover texts, for instance. The special rules for Endorsements sections make it possible to use the GFDL for an official standard. This would permit modified versions, but they could not be labeled as “the standard”. This means we can have an "Official" source of docs but that people can still use contents from those docs in there "Unofficial" whatever. -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B
participants (3)
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Gerald Pfeifer -
Richard Brown -
Simon Lees