On 04/23/2015 08:41 AM, John Snow wrote:
I know I said "primarily to be difficult" but I was just being
facetious. I didn't find the GPL2+ to be suitable for documentation,
strictly, so I went to read up on the documentation licenses that the
fsf support/recommend.
There's the GNU documentation license, but I found that unsuitable for a
couple reasons -- one of them was that you are forbidden(!) from
changing the text of the license,
Note that it is usually only the license text proper that is locked
down; the rest of the documentation is not under the same restriction
unless you declare specific invariant sections such as a cover page. But
I know that the Debian project has typically frowned upon any use of FDL
with invariant sections, and the FDL has therefore earned a somewhat
questionable reputation outside of FSF projects.
and there are some provisions in there
I didn't like, such as requiring the full text of the license to be
included with compiled copies of the document. That's not something I
care about -- a reference in source, for instance, is sufficient, or a
copy of the license being distributed *with* the compiled source is
fine, but I have no need for the full license to be copied with the
compiled version.
Yes, I like those benefits of the FreeBSD Documentation License.
The other documentation license the fsf recommends is the FreeBSD one,
and that one looked appealing, short, and to the point, so it is the one
I chose. It is essentially the FreeBSD license with words altered to
clarify what "code" and "source" means with respect to a document.
In particular, according to the FSF, the FreeBSD Documentation License
_should be_ acceptable for use with a GPLv2 program:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#FreeDocumentationLicenses
although this is probably not the right list to get a definitive answer
from a lawyer familiar with the various copyright licenses and laws.
Sorry for /actually/ being difficult; but Eric Blake was urging me to
select a license instead of relying on the implicit GPL, so I did go out
of my way to choose one I found appropriate.
I stand by my pick.
I also agree with the pick; I think that GPLv2+ on documentation is a
bit questionable - if someone else implements the same interface using
just the documentation, is their code required to be under the GPL by
virtue of "using" the documentation? Using a more permissive
documentation license feels nicer to me, as it would allow non-GPL
implementations if someone is so inclined. Sorry if encouraging the
issue has made matters more difficult.