On Sun, 2005-10-16 at 10:15 -0400, Alexander Kirillov wrote: > On 10/15/05, Brent Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > 2) Standardize the titles of each document by removing version numbers, > > fixing capitalization, removing unnecessary articles and adding a type > > to the title such as "Manual", "Tutorial", or "Guide". > > > > - Many documents have a trailing version number in their title. I would > > like to remove this from all documents, since docbook provides an > > element, <releaseinfo>, to contain this. Having the version number in > > the title is superfluous and distracting. This will need to be > > changed in translations as well. > > > The version number is there for a reason. Namely, GFDL requires that > "derivative document" must have a different title than that of the > original document. Thus, if the document title is just "gedit Manual", > no one but the original author can make modifications and release > under the title "gedit Manual". Having version number as part of title > bypasses this problem.
So we actively chose a license that requires us to make documentation that is unfriendly to readers? Honestly, the sorts of requirements the FDL has placed on us are ridiculous. Anyway, I already changed some documents to have the sans-version titles. The way I see things, what I did was perfectly legal, since I did change the title from the version I modified. I changed the title from "Foo Help 1.4" to "Foo Help". Sure, maybe *some* version of the document in the past had the title "Foo Help", but not the version I derived from. Unless, of course, some weird twist of legal logic forbids that, but I would argue that that creates a NON-FREE license on the same grounds that the old BSD advertising clause did: It places undue restrictions on people creating derivative works. They have to check the entire history of a document to make sure the title they use doesn't conflict with a title anybody else used. With version numbers in titles, we could argue that you just increment the version number, thereby obviating any potential conflicts with past revisions. But what if you and I both made a derivative of the document "Foo App 1.4"? We'd both call our documents "Foo App 1.5". Whatever utility the FDL thought it was providing is now gone. The FDL also has weird requirements on revision history, and the ways in which we've abused DocBook in order to fulfill those requirements are pretty insane. Both of these problems boil down to the same thing: These requirements are only for people other than the copyright holder. The FDL is designed for the copyright holder to be able to produce normal works, and for the *occasional* fork from other people. The Gnome Documentation Project doesn't work that way. We gets lots of contributors (or, at least, we wish we did). Every revision of our documentation may add two or three new copyright holders, and those revisions happen every six months. Clearly, the version in CVS is what we want to be the definitive, non-forked version. It's what *should* qualify for the FDL's implicit idea of a mainline version, but it doesn't, because we don't have a single copyright holder. Given these issues, together with the problems the Debian team have had with the FDL, I think it's time we started investigating other licenses for our documentation. And we should choose a license that allows us to write documents that conform to sane style guidelines. I can pretty much guarantee that no professional style guides on this planet will recommend putting version numbers in titles. Technical limitations are a poor excuse for crappy output, especially when those technical limitations are self-imposed. -- Shaun _______________________________________________ gnome-doc-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-doc-list
