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

[Steve Wills]

I agree that of the licenses we looked at CCSA seemed to make me feel the happiest, a most subjective argument, I know.  I am curious what the argument is that supports CCSA being incompatible with GPL'ed software?

If it is merely a concern about snippets of code being re-licensed, couldn't a disclaimer cover that?   "snippet reprinted for documentation purposes only, all GPL restrictions apply?" etc. etc.

Stev3
p.s. hi KGS :)

From: open-ils-documentation-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org [mailto:open-ils-documentation-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] On Behalf Of Karen Schneider
Sent: Monday, November 02, 2009 8:29 PM
To: Karen Collier
Cc: open-ils-dev; open-ils-general; docs; Public Open-ILS documentation discussion
Subject: Re: [OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] Licensing for Evergreen Documentation - Call for Input

The Fedora Project is using Creative Commons licensing for its documentation (as do Wikipedia and the Gnome project). See: http://lwn.net/Articles/355546/

Cheers,

-- Karen G. Schneider
On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 12:34 PM, Karen Collier <kcollier at kent.lib.md.us<mailto:kcollier at kent.lib.md.us>> 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

--
Karen Collier
Public Services Librarian
Kent County Public Library
408 High Street
Chestertown, MD 21620
410-778-3636

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