On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 02:00, Frank Peters <[email protected]> wrote: > >> As I've said before, we can't change the past. But we can prevent >> repeating past mistakes. We need to ensure that in the future that > > In the past, this was no mistake but a prerequisite for docs. > >> the core project documentation is developed and maintained under the >> ALv2 license. > > I thought this was a given anyway? > > As to user docs produced by the ODFAuthors we need to ask them to > dual-license as they did for OOo, but I am not sure if their > current practice to publish under CC-BY would be sufficient anyway > (see above). >
If user guides are considered to be "core documentation", then their licensing may be an issue. If they are not "core", then it isn't. IMO they are not "core" but we had that discussion before and IIRC Rob's view was that they are core. As I've noted before, tracking down past contributors to get agreement on changing the license of existing material would be difficult and in some cases impossible. Given that the existing material is the obvious place to start when producing user guides updated/amended for AOO, then the license of that existing material is relevant. AFAIK, we can't just take the material, revise it, and change the license; so the books would need to be completely rewritten. IMO that would be very impractical, because the available people barely keep up with minor updates. BTW, I think the user guides could do with a major overhaul, and if enough skilled technical writers turned up to do that job, I would be absolutely delighted. Alas, I can't see that happening, so all I can see (at least for the next year) is either a minor update to the existing books (under a compatible, but non-Apache, license) or... no books at all. --Jean
