Re: Website content licensing

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2011-03-11 at 14:39 -0600, Paul Cutler wrote:
> I had a discussion with Bradley Kuhn at last year's Linux Foundation
> Collaboration Summit - it's not possible to dual license these two
> copylefts.  The GNOME Documentation team is licensing all new
> documentation for applications (and on library.gnome.org) under a
> CC-BY 3.0 license.[1]

For the record, most of the new documentation is under the
CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. We are still using a copyleft. Also,
most of the new developer documentation (such as the demos)
add this boilerplate exception:

  As a special exception, the copyright holders give you
  permission to copy, modify, and distribute the example
  code contained in this document under the terms of your
  choosing, without restriction.

Luis worked with the SFLC lawyers to get us that blurb. Some
wiki pages have substantial code samples, so this might be
relevant there.

I think the real issue with dual-licensing is content reuse.
If you're always the upstream original content, dual-licensing
is great for people who want to reuse your content in other
free content. But if all your content is dual-licensed, it
really limits where you can reuse content from. For the docs,
our two most active downstream were moving to CC-BY-SA, and
we wanted to be able to reuse their material.

--
Shaun