[Techtalk] Documentation licencing

Tabatha Marshall tabatha at merlinmonroe.com
Thu Dec 18 00:58:44 EST 2003


On Wed, 2003-12-17 at 22:34, Mary wrote:
> The author of the Open Publication Licence is closing up shop and
> joining the Creative Commons project:
>     
>     I'm closing OpenContent because I think Creative Commons is doing a
>     better job of providing licensing options which will stand up in
>     court. As I close OpenContent, I join Creative Commons as Director
>     of Educational Licenses.
>     ...
>     The OpenContent License and Open Publication License will remain
>     online for archival purposes in their current locations. However, no
>     future development will occur on the licenses themselves.

I was surprised to learn this recently as well, but was very glad to
find out.  As you know, we talk about this on the LDP discussion list
from time to time, and it's been on everyone's mind lately. 

It might interest you to know that O'Reilly is working on adopting this
license for their books:  http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/.  I've been
communicating with one of the editors there lately he feels very
positive about them taking this step.  All of that information is at
their link though, if you want to know more.

> However, I would be interested in a discussion of docs licence choice if
> anyone wants to use this as a jumping off point (since it's relevant to
> open source development, I think doc licencing, and documentation
> discussion is relevant to techtalk).

I was also interested to find out that Creative Commons is recommending
the GFDL in the case of software documentation.  I'd be curious to know
what the FSF thinks of Creative Commons.  :D

Another link was provided on the LDP discussion list by Rick Moen, on
Debian's position regarding the GFDL which I'd like to pass on: 
http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml.

I used to always recommend GFDL until I found out about the Debian
issues (but that was when the LDP license was the only alternative I
knew about, and to me it's fairly useless).  Creative commons seems to
be the way to go from what I'm hearing, but it'd be nice to hear some
other opinions.

Tab

-- 
Tabatha Marshall
Web: www.merlinmonroe.com
Linux Documentation Project Review Coordinator (http://www.tldp.org)
Linux Counter Area Manager US:wa (http://counter.li.org)



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