I noticed recently that Factor's license at
http://factorcode.org/license.txt doesn't really apply to the
documentation. It only mentions the source code, and the fact that, in
compiled form, the license should be included in documentation. So our
documentation is unlicensed, meaning that we have full rights to do
whatever we want with it, but other people can't be guaranteed to do
what they want with it.

So there are three solutions. The first is to modify the existing
license to mention the documentation, under basically the same terms.
But this would require contacting everyone who has contributed to
Factor, some of whom (Adam, Mackenzie) aren't around anymore. The
second solution is to make a very similar, but separate license for
the documentation. A possible model to go by is the FreeBSD
documentation license
(http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-doc-license.html), which is
basically the BSD license but with the word "documentation" in it. It
retains the clause about compiled documentation, which I think is
still relevant to Factor because docs which are loaded into the image
are basically in a "compiled" form. This would only require contacting
the documentation authors, which are all still around, as far as I
know. The third option is using the Creative Commons Attribution
License, which could be legally more secure and, but I don't like all
the legalese involved. It seems much too complicated. This, too, would
only require the documentation authors to be contacted.

So, what do you guys think? This may seem unnecessary, but it needs to
be clear to all future users of Factor that the documentation is free.
And we need to do this before the project gets any bigger.

Daniel Ehrenberg

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