Documentation Licensing

[Andrew Cowie]

On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 03:30 -0400, Jason Carson wrote:
> All I want is that someone can take my documentation and modify it for
> commercial or non commercial purposes provided the modified work is also
> licensed under the same license and remains free.

The relevant question isn't whether you want to enable the same licence
terms to apply (they will, regardless), but whether you want it to be
copyleft (ie GPL, CC-BY-SA) or not.

"Remains free [no matter what]" is a lay interpretation of what copyleft
means, but of course the GPL requirement (for instance) to share your
source code is interpreted by some to be less than ideal for commercial
entities.

That, of course, is nonsense (else IBM couldn't be such a major
contributor to the Linux kernel, for one example amongst thousands), but
"commercial use" in the software context is usually taken to imply
"close source proprietary use" which is where copyleft is not as
appealing.

Anyway, there was a fairly good recent discussion on the topic of GFDL
vs CC (vs GPL) on the mailing list of the Bazaar version control system
not too long ago. Someone was asking bzr to relicence its documentation
CC. As theirs is a community with quite a number of different interests
and participants — both corporate and not — representing a huge range of
views, the discussion was wide ranging and well informed.
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/2009q3/062329.html

I tend to side with Robert Collins on this one: a) there is no reason
for a project's documentation not to be under the GPL [if the software
itself is], and b) having one (and only one) licence across a project is
vitally important; if you try to have multiple (especially if there are
multiple incompatible) licences then all you're doing is calling down a
perpetual world of hurt in the years to come.

AfC
Sydney


-- 
Andrew Frederick Cowie

Operational Dynamics is an operations and engineering consultancy
focusing on IT strategy, organizational architecture, systems
review, and effective procedures for change management: enabling
successful deployment of mission critical information technology in
enterprises, worldwide.

http://www.operationaldynamics.com/
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