[OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] Documentation licensing

[Dan Scott]

Hi folks:

Just wanted to follow up my previous message about the need to have an
explicit license for purposes of being able to freely redistribute and
adapt contributed materials. Given that Equinox has a number of
writers plugging away at documentation, and Project Conifer will be
contributing documentation in the January -> April 2009 time frame, I
wondered whether it would be possible to reach agreement relatively
quickly on a licensing policy for Evergreen's official documentation?
"Ha", you say, "fat chance on quick agreement."

Well, maybe. A suggestion from Bradley Kuhn, former director of the
Free Software Foundation and current director of the Software Freedom
Conservancy, is to dual-license the documentation: put it under the
GPL to match the license for the Evergreen software, but also make it
available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike
(CC-BY-SA) license. A dual-licensing scheme maximizes the ability of
the documentation to be used and adapted in different contexts without
having to worry about conflicting license terms - so, for example, we
could include a copy of the documentation heavily intermingled with
the GPLed source code for the software, but also create and
redistribute derivative works that mix in CC-BY-SA artwork and other
CC-BY-SA licensed documentation. It's about maximum flexibility.

-- 
Dan Scott
Laurentian University