Ok, everyone who prefers to ignore legal speak, please ignore this mail. ;-)
I get the feeling there's some confusion about the licenses, so I'd like to tell what I think to know about it. I don't guarantee correctness, and IANAL. :-P On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 04:26:09AM +0100, EdorFaus wrote: > On 01/17/2014 12:03 PM, Werner Almesberger wrote: > >EdorFaus wrote: > >>... Although, hm. A bit of looking around shows that CC-BY-SA is not > >>compatible with the GNU GPL. Debian's stance on this is that any CC license before 3.0 is not even considered free. CC-SA and CC-BY-SA are free for 3.0 licenses, but indeed incompatible with the GPL. For that reason, I think documentation is often dual-licensed. Note that citing a piece of code in the documentation would be allowed even with a very restrictive (and incompatible) license on the code, because it's fair use. If the documentation wants to use large parts of the code, it probably makes more sense to point to it instead of including it anyway. In short, I don't think there is a problem to dual-license the documentation. The other license that was mentioned is GFDL. That one deserves some explanation. It is much like the GPL, but it has an extra option in it: it may contain "invariant sections", which are pieces of text that may not be changed and may not be removed from derivative works. This seems like a very non-free clause, and it is the reason Debian does indeed consider the GFDL to be a non-free license. However, it's not as crazy as it sounds. The point of using a copyleft license is (for many people) to try to make a change in the world. As an author, you donate your work to the community in an attempt to build that community. The fight between philosopher/idealist Richard Stallman and engineer/pragmatist Linus Torvalds made very clear that the message of the GNU project, that software should be free, needs to be told (if you care about it). This is exactly what the invariant sections are meant for. It allows GNU documentation to contain the GNU manifesto, and derivative versions must include it as well. The GPL makes sure that the freedoms are not only valid for the person directly receiving the work, but also for anyone receiving it indirectly. Similarly, the GFDL makes sure that such an important message is not only received by the first recipient, but by anyone who gets access to it. I'm not proposing to use the GFDL. I think the fact that it is GPL-incompatible is too large a restriction. I just wanted to explain what its background is. Because unfortunately many people seem to consider the invariant sections evil, while they are very much meant to improve the world. > I'm not sure if it's really a significant issue in practice, and my > search results also indicate many just ignore the issue and combine > them anyway, whether or not that's technically legal in their case. I am inclined to start doing that as well. Many people who license things as CC-SA or GPL really don't care that much, and just want the spirit of copyleft. They're not going to start lawsuits anyway, and certainly not as long as the result is still copyleft. > >>P.S. Things would be *so* much simpler if only everyone could use > >>CC0 instead of all these other licenses... Fat chance of that > >>happening though. CC0 doesn't do copyleft. It's a statement of "I think this is worthless, but if you can use it, more power to you". (Obviously that's my interpretation.) A copyleft license, on the other hand, says "I made something valuable, and I donate it to the community without allowing people to use it against that community". > Yeah, that's pretty much precisely what I meant - it would be nice > if we could, but in practice, we *can't*, so we won't. No matter how > complex that makes things. So I think we're mostly in agreement, except that I don't think it would be nice if everything was CC0. Well, unless there wouldn't be any "bad guys", but that is so unrealistic that I don't even consider it. :-P > It's basically the same line of thinking as I have with regards to > the core tenet of communism. It's a rather nice-sounding idea, IMO - > but it doesn't work in practice. We humans simply aren't built for > it. I have more hope for "most people want to help each other" (the basis of communism) than "nobody wants to take personal profit from harming others". Especially in a non-communist society. ;-) Thanks, Bas _______________________________________________ Qi Hardware Discussion List Mail to list (members only): [email protected] Subscribe or Unsubscribe: http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/mailman/listinfo/discussion
