Re: Documenting Gnome apps with the GPL

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Sat, Dec 29, 2001 at 11:35:24PM -0700, Richard Stallman wrote:
>     It's at least
>     2 pages just for the licence. I prefer to preserve trees and keep the
>     documentation under the same licences as the rest of the package.
> 
> I obtained the tar file of libxml-doc.  According to wc -l, the HTML
> files there add up to around 140,000 lines, which would be over 2000
> pages if printed.  Even supposing that half of the lines in the HTML
> don't correspond to real text lines, that would still be over 1000
> pages.

  Well I don't expect anybody to print the HTML ouput (that would really
be a waste of trees :-)
But I expect people to at least print man pages, or the tutorial part
of the documentation which are definitely smaller. I don't see anything
in the GFDL covering part of a document, only the terms Document and way
to aggregate them are covered. So saying the Licence applies to the
"documentation" of a module at large should probably refined into
saying that the Licence applies to all the documents provided as
documentation for the module (and those documents should probably be
enumerated).
  
  If you suggest that small documents be released under another Licence,
then the core of your observation covers the (relatively) large set of
HTML pages describing the API. But those pages are generated from the
source by pure mechanical processing (C comments -> SGML -> HTML) like
most of the GTK/GNOME API documentations. I don't see a good logical
reason to put what is simply a derived object from the source code under
a different (and potentially conflicting) Licence than the original product.

  It seems to me that the GFDL has been designed with a different 
document model in mind - like large handwritten documents - where the
terms of the Licence makes more sense than for small document or
document generated by extraction from other sources. And I would not draw
any generalized conclusion on whether this Licence is proper or should
be enforced for all documentation in the GNOME project.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network https://rhn.redhat.com/
veillard redhat com  | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/
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