Re: [Nano-devel] updates, and relicensing questions...

[David Ramsey]

On 8/6/07, Jordi Mallach <address@hidden> wrote:

<snip>

> Re the dual docs licencing I proposed, GFDL is even acceptable in
> Debian if no invariant sections are used; we discussed this a while
> back.
>
> I guess the only "standard" invariants are the front and backcover
> texts, which we can happily omit. Apparently GNU ed does this, to name
> one example:
>
>    Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
>    document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License,
>    Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software
>    Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and
>    no Back-Cover Texts.

Good to know that there's an example of it.

> If we do exactly this, Debian'd be happy with just FDL docs.

Hmmm.  I've been looking into the GFDL 2.0 drafts, and to a lesser
extent the related SFDL drafts, and DFSG compatibility doesn't seem to
be in them yet (e.g. section 4, requirement L: "For any section Entitled
"Acknowledgements" or "Dedications", Preserve the Title of the section,
and preserve in the section all the substance and tone of each of the
contributor acknowledgements and/or dedications given therein."  What
does "substance and tone" mean?)  The SFDL's lack of unmodifiable
sections is certainly closer to it, though.

To be fair, the GFDL 2 draft is dated September 2006, during which the
main focus was still on GPL 3, so this could change in the next draft.
And apparently I'm not the only one concerned about GPL incompatibility,
as given by the comments here:

http://gplv3.fsf.org/comments/gfdl-draft-1.html#1893:2140:2349:

But until this is addressed in another draft, I'm a lot more comfortable
going with the maximum flexibility option, which would be the dual
license.

As for how to do this, I've had trouble finding an example of
dual-licensing text, so here's something modeled partially on the Perl
dual-licensing text, and partially on one of the FSF webpages I've seen
( http://directory.fsf.org/texinfo.html ):

    This is free documentation; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
    under the terms of either:

    a) the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
    Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option) any later version,
    or

    b) the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later
    version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
    Sections, no Front-Cover Texts and no Back-Cover Texts.

    Copies of these licenses are included in the files COPYING and
    COPYING.DOC.

This, of course, assumes that the GFDL 1.2 is added under the filename
COPYING.DOC.

Comments?  (Does anyone have a better example of dual-licensing text?)
Thanks in advance.