* Stefan Kost <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > a quick update - on > http://live.gnome.org/DocumentationProject_2fTasks > I've started to put some info about the doc-licence situation together.
I've been following this page lately. Are there any documentation writers/contributors that are displeased by releasing their work under GFDL? Is there an official statement of the GNOME Project regarding the licence (except the fearless leader's mail in this thread)? > Quickly grepping through the OMF files shows me that nearly all our > docs are currently published under the GFDL though. Which is not a problem at all, IMHO. AFAIK the GNOME Project is part of the GNU Project [1] and its official desktop. GFDL is the licence of choice that is time proven. Well, I agree that might be ugly and there is some unclear stuff but no licence can be pretty. "Debian's postition" in fact is a position of _some_ members of the project, there's no GR (General Resolution) for that and removal of "non-free" documentation hasn't started yet. Besides, (again AFAIK) there are no Invariant Sections in GNOME Documentation and there are no bugs of "serious" severity filed against GNOME packages. There is resistance among many Debian Developers (particularly those that work on Emacs, coreutils, gcc and *lots* of GNU originating stuff), and also by the DDs who package GNOME. To illustrate how insane the whole thing is, you may take a look at some extremely funny bugs [2], or simply follow the discussions for "non-free" documentation bugs in Debian's unofficial page for tracking RC bugs [3]. In simple words, the GNU Emacs Manual, the one that Richard Stallman has written for the people, contains the invariant sections "Distribution" (where there are instructions how to get/distribute it and a list of all contributors) and "The GNU Manifesto". Debian considers that it is immoral not to be able to change the GNU Manifesto :-) But Debian still distributes the /contrib and /non-free sections, claiming that they're not part of the distribution! Given the fact that on [EMAIL PROTECTED] there were threads like "GPL should be considered non-free because we can't change it" and "RMS travels and preaches only with the purpose to earn money", I want to point out that this mailing list, along with the fact that it is very useful, is a cloac where some people throw their random thoughts. Don't get me wrong, my heart has the form of a swirl, I am a devoted Debian fan, but in this case I think that the GNOME Project should not pay attention to them, just like the FSF is doing. Rereading GFDL might help to discover its spirit -- watching and interpreting the words with a magnifier is not the correct approach. > Is anyone familiar with the CreativeCOmmonsText licence? Any other > licences. Is there a chance that the GFDL gets fixed? The CC's wizard for choosing a licence for a particular work was recommending GFDL until recently for text, IIRC. I personally think that CC licences are not mature enough, especially regarding documentation (and considered non-free by Debian, this time for a reason). Another approach (if everybody hates GFDL) is to use GPL, that's what the GNUstep Project is doing for most of the docs, even the conents of the wiki. It looks like this is a long annoying mail, sorry for that. And certainly you can ignore my opinion as I haven't contributed enough for GNOME in order to have guts to speak out. [1] Which reminds me how annoying is to see statements that GNOME is "Open Source Software". [2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=207932 [3] http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php -- Yavor Doganov JID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Free Software Association - Bulgaria http://fsa-bg.org GNOME in Bulgarian! http://gnome.cult.bg _______________________________________________ gnome-doc-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-doc-list
