[Savannah-hackers-public] Savannah hosting requirements on documentation license (was: Re: [task #16589] Submission of P2P Social Network Pandora)

[Jing Luo]

Hello licensing team,

I hate to bother you with new work, but this time I would really like 
your clarification on savannah's hosting requirements, where Ineiev 
disagreed with me on a non-gnu group review:

On 2024-10-08 02:40, Ineiev wrote:
> Follow-up Comment #4, task #16589 (group administration):
[...]
> > > (5) GFDL: the documentations have "GFDL" on the footer, but the
> > > license text is not included anywhere. Also, we require "or later",
> > > so you need to change them to something like "FDL1.3+".
> > > Alternatively, it's perfectly fine for documentations to have the
> > > same license as the code (GPLv2+).
>
> Savannah hosting requirements for the documentation is to be released 
> under
> GFDL-compatible terms.  GPLv2+ isn't GFDL-compatible.
>
>
> [...]
>  <https://savannah.nongnu.org/task/?16589>.

The exact words on the hosting requirements [1] for documentation is:

"For manuals, we recommend GNU FDL version X-or-later, where X is the 
latest released version of the FDL; other licensing compatible with that 
is acceptable."

My impression is that this sentence does not _require_ documentation to 
be licensed under FDL1.3+ or something compatible with FDL1.3+, it is 
only a recommendation. If my impression was wrong, in my not so humble 
opinion, this requirement would be very unreasonable, and we should 
reconsider it. We already have many gnu and non-gnu groups in savannah 
that use the same license for code and docs; and a documentation 
licensed under GPL is certainly libre, I don't see any ethical reason to 
object that. Once a certain philosopher suggested on a mailing list that 
a particular manual should be relicensed to GPLv3+, or CC-BY-SA [2].

[1] https://savannah.gnu.org/register/requirements.php
[2] 
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/private/www-discuss/2024-January/016589.html

Lukewarm regards,

--
Jing Luo
About me: https://jing.rocks/about/
GPG Fingerprint: 4E09 8D19 00AA 3F72 1899 2614 09B3 316E 13A1 1EFC

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