RE: CVS, templates, and changes to docs

[Gregory Leblanc <GLeblanc cu-portland edu>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David C. Mason [mailto:dcm@redhat.com]
> Sent: Friday, April 28, 2000 2:45 PM
> To: gnome-doc-list@gnome.org
> Subject: Re: CVS, templates, and changes to docs
> 
> Gregory Leblanc <GLeblanc@cu-portland.edu> writes:
> 
> > Is there any freedom with this?  I won't stop writing if I 
> have to use this
> > license, but I don't really like it all that much, the Open 
> Publication
> > stuff from http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/ is more to 
> MY liking.  As a
> > totally unrelated note, I believe that some of the lawyers 
> from Macmillan
> > publishing house have approved this license for their books.
> 
> Well the main problem is that we (the GNOME Community) want to and
> have always wanted to align ourselves with the GNU project. So far we
> have done a pretty good job at it. We already make RMS mad by not
> using info to do all our docs - we should at least use the GNU
> project's licenses.

I hate to put it this way, but after having a number of conversations with
RMS, I've come to the shocking conclusion that he does not know everything,
nor is he always right.  Not trying to imply that you think this, but he
seems to.  I respect RMS for what he has done, and for his idealism.  I also
respect that GNOME is trying to GNU, which is a REALLY good thing.  However,
just like the GPL is too restrictive, I feel that the DGPL is too
restrictive.  The only part that I really object to is the "cover texts"
which aren't being used at this point, but I don't recall if they can be
added by another author.  If they can, that's bad, because it allows
advertising, or other non-desireables, to be placed with the document and
removes the ability to remove those pieces.

As of the info <censored>, DocBook is a documentation format that is used
widely by free and non-free documentation projects across the world, and
from my brief look at the info stuff, DocBook has a much nicer potential
than info, especially with that future indexing that I keep talking about
(XML/SGML DocBook makes a beautiful object oriented database, if only it had
some tools).

> I personally like the new license and saying MacMillan's lawyers
> approved the open content one actually scares me! O'Reilly is already
> using the FDL with approval from their lawyers but that adds about as
> much to the discussion as the MacMillan reference.

I'll agree on that one, the only reason that I brough it up was because I
had a conversation with someone at the Linux Expo Montreal about the
licenses, and about a book that he's writing with MacMillan.  They are a
much larger publisher, with wider distribution, than O'Reilly, and are
trying to become respected for their technical publications.  Besides, more
publishers using "open" or "free" licenses can only be good for us (the
community).

> We can not force anyone to use a license - at all. But we, as
> maintainers, can say that your documentation under another license
> will not be shipped with the docs - or the app.

Which is basically "forcing" people to use a given license, or not write at
all.  Don't hide it behind another name, please.

> My personal opinion - obviously, is to use the license and trademark
> paragraph we have now to make sure we are still mostly GNU
> compliant. If we move away from it, we will experience static we don't
> need to have.
> 
> I'm not sure I just made sense...I'll revisit this when my head clears
> from the long day :)

Thanks for sharing your thoughts,
	Greg