[OPEN-ILS-DEV] [OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] Licensing for Evergreen Documentation - Call for Input

[Dan Scott]

On Mon, 2009-11-02 at 15:34 -0500, Karen Collier wrote:
> As you may already be aware, the Evergreen Documentation Interest Group is working toward creating a set of "Official" community driven documentation for Evergreen, using the DocBook standard to produce both HTML and PDF versions, as well as distributing DocBook XML files for customization purposes.  
> 
> We've been discussing licensing issues for this documentation effort, but wanted to get input on this important issue from the larger Evergreen community.  Specifically, we're trying to decide which license or licenses to apply to our documentation efforts.  It seems the general feeling is that we'd like a copyleft license, but which one remains to be determined.
> 
> The candidates we've considered include Creative Commons Share-Alike (CCSA), GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), and the GNU General Public License (GPL).  We've heard from various sources that the CCSA and the FDL are not compatible with the GPL (under which the Evergreen Software is licensed), which would seem to make them unusable for our purposes.  Do you agree or disagree with this conclusion?
> 
> The GNU GPL would seem to be compatible with itself, but it's my understanding that it is intended for use with software, not documentation.  But perhaps it could be used for our documentation anyway?
> 
> So... thoughts from the community?  What licenses do other open source projects you know of use for their documentation?  What license(s) do you think we should license Evergreen documentation under, and why?  
> 
> Any input would be appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> Karen Collier
> Evergreen Documentation Interest Group Co-Facilitator
> 

Hi Karen:

I don't think the GNU Free Documentation License would be very
appropriate for us because the issue of invariant sections (sections
that must be copied verbatim and which do not allow derivatives) is
irrelevant to our concerns. We're not worried about people taking our
documentation and twisting it out of context to misrepresent our
position. Likewise, the provisions in section 4 pertaining to
modifications are onerous.

Despite being GPL software, MySQL uses a horribly limiting license for
its documentation: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.4/en/index.html

PostgreSQL uses a variation on the permissive modified BSD license to
cover both their documentation and software:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/LEGALNOTICE.html

A while back I asked Bradley Kuhn, previously the executive director of
the Free Software Foundation (FSF), currently the president of the
Software Conservancy and a policy analyst for the Software Freedom Law
Center, about this.  His suggestion was to make the documentation
available under *both* the Creative Commons By-Attribution Share-Alike
(CC-BY-SA) and the GNU General Public License (GPL) [1,2], with the
understanding that the GPL licensing would primarily be for code
examples distributed with the documentation - for example, for the code
included in the work-in-progress Evergreen development tutorial [3].

Note that neither Bradley nor I are lawyers and therefore none of what
we say should be considered to constitute legal advice. However, Bradley
has a tremendous amount of experience in these fields and, barring the
involvement of an actual lawyer with a knowledge of the technical
documentation licensing field, I trust his suggestion over pretty much
anything that other projects might have chosen to do sans legal advice.

Assuming that this dual-license approach that I advocated previously has
been deemed to not be acceptable for some good reason, my fallback
position would be to choose a permissive license, such as the FreeBSD
Documentation License [4] - the FSF considers this compatible with the
GNU GPL [5], and it's a heck of a lot simpler to understand and apply
than any of the alternatives.

1. http://identi.ca/conversation/1390015#notice-1391062
2. http://www.softwarefreedom.org/podcast/2009/sep/15/0x16/
3. http://evergreen-ils.org/~denials/workshop.html
4. http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-doc-license.html
5. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#DocumentationLicenses

Dan