Re: sugested doc license

[Yavor Doganov <yavor doganov org>]

* Stefan Kost <ensonic hora-obscura de> writes:

> a quick update - on
> http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject_2fTasks
> I've started to put some info about the doc-licence situation together.

I've been following this page lately.  Are there any documentation
writers/contributors that are displeased by releasing their work under
GFDL?  Is there an official statement of the GNOME Project regarding
the licence (except the fearless leader's mail in this thread)?

> Quickly grepping through the OMF files shows me that nearly all our
> docs are currently published under the GFDL though.

Which is not a problem at all, IMHO.  AFAIK the GNOME Project is part
of the GNU Project [1] and its official desktop.  GFDL is the licence
of choice that is time proven.  Well, I agree that might be ugly and
there is some unclear stuff but no licence can be pretty.  "Debian's
postition" in fact is a position of _some_ members of the project,
there's no GR (General Resolution) for that and removal of "non-free"
documentation hasn't started yet.  Besides, (again AFAIK) there are no
Invariant Sections in GNOME Documentation and there are no bugs of
"serious" severity filed against GNOME packages.  There is resistance
among many Debian Developers (particularly those that work on Emacs,
coreutils, gcc and *lots* of GNU originating stuff), and also by the
DDs who package GNOME.  To illustrate how insane the whole thing is,
you may take a look at some extremely funny bugs [2], or simply follow
the discussions for "non-free" documentation bugs in Debian's
unofficial page for tracking RC bugs [3].  In simple words, the GNU
Emacs Manual, the one that Richard Stallman has written for the
people, contains the invariant sections "Distribution" (where there
are instructions how to get/distribute it and a list of all
contributors) and "The GNU Manifesto".  Debian considers that it is
immoral not to be able to change the GNU Manifesto :-)  But Debian
still distributes the /contrib and /non-free sections, claiming that
they're not part of the distribution!  Given the fact that on
debian-legal l d o there were threads like "GPL should be considered
non-free because we can't change it" and "RMS travels and preaches
only with the purpose to earn money", I want to point out that this
mailing list, along with the fact that it is very useful, is a cloac
where some people throw their random thoughts.  Don't get me wrong, my
heart has the form of a swirl, I am a devoted Debian fan, but in this
case I think that the GNOME Project should not pay attention to them,
just like the FSF is doing.  Rereading GFDL might help to discover its
spirit -- watching and interpreting the words with a magnifier is not
the correct approach.

> Is anyone familiar with the CreativeCOmmonsText licence? Any other
> licences. Is there a chance that the GFDL gets fixed?

The CC's wizard for choosing a licence for a particular work was
recommending GFDL until recently for text, IIRC.  I personally think
that CC licences are not mature enough, especially regarding
documentation (and considered non-free by Debian, this time for a
reason).  
Another approach (if everybody hates GFDL) is to use GPL, that's what
the GNUstep Project is doing for most of the docs, even the conents of
the wiki.

It looks like this is a long annoying mail, sorry for that.  And
certainly you can ignore my opinion as I haven't contributed enough
for GNOME in order to have guts to speak out.

[1] Which reminds me how annoying is to see statements that GNOME is
"Open Source Software".
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=207932
[3] http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php

-- 
Yavor Doganov		JID: doganov jabber minus273 org
Free Software Association - Bulgaria   http://fsa-bg.org
GNOME in Bulgarian!		    http://gnome.cult.bg