Andre Schnabel wrote:
As it is nowhere visible at the OOoAuthors site, that
documents could be used t the OOo project under PDL,
This is the first time you have brought this up, and it's an easy fix.
Give me a couple of days please.
You might even remember, that I have asked to write down your concerns
about the PDL and ask the Council to revise the PDL.
But I already did, several times. Here they are again:
* PDL includes forced distribution. Non-free (section 3.2).
* PDL requires you to keep a list of all changes unless you use
something like CVS (which we don't have). It is unclear how detailed
those have to be. This causes undue burden and legal uncertainty.
(section 3.3).
* PDL requires you to make your version available for 5 yeas. This
is undue burden on volunteers who may not be around in 5 yers. OOo
is 5 years old, OOoAuthors is around 2. I don't know where I'll be
5 years from now. (section 3.3)
* General complexity/confusion. For example, it defines "commercial
use" as any act of making the documentation available to a third
party. This isn't an issue of distribution, but of the license
being confusing. I feel nervous using a license I don't understand.
* Incompatible with the largest pools of works (Creative Commons,
GPL, GFDL). It creates an isolated island.
* Doesn't fit the Debian Free Software Guidelines. This removes
one possibly important avenue of distribution.
Some comments from Debian Legal (relevant to the above):
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/03/msg00260.html
If you read the Council lists, it was
discussed to ask OOoAuthors to give some of the profits to OOo (in form
of Team OOo e.V.).
But OOoAuthors is not selling the guides. A third party (Friends of
OpenDocument is). Most OOoAuthors members are not members of Friends of
OpenDocument and most members of Friends of OpenDocument are not in
OOoAuthors.
Anyway .. to me, the situation seems very unfortunate. OOoAuthers has
something to provide, where OOo could learn from.
Thank you Andre. I appreciate that and I want the best for OOo. As I
said above, please give me a couple of days to address the concern you
brought up about the PDL note. We'll get that sorted out.
Cheers,
Daniel.
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