On Saturday 13 January 2007 02:07, you wrote: > On 1/9/07, Lourens Veen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Tuesday 09 January 2007 04:52, Timothy Miller wrote: > > > Please have a look at the documentation I just wrote for the > > > video controller. I think Patrick especially could help, but > > > others are familiar with it, and anyone can check for > > > inconsistenties and general nonsense. > > > > First, I would like to say that it's well-written and that the > > style is excellent. Good work! > > Thank you for the feedback! I've made a number of changes. Tell me > what you think.
In summary: it's looking good! Well, that's all I have to say on the document itself actually :-). > > About the licence, I've never heard of the Free Art licence, but > > perhaps it could be published under the GNU FDL or a Creative > > Commons licence instead? Those are more widely spread, which would > > help compatibility. Unless of course there's something in the Free > > Art licence but not in the others that you really want to have. > > When reading about document licenses on Wikipedia, it stated that the > FSF's recommended document license is the Free Art license. I guess > wikipedia is out of date on that. That sounded interesting, so I had a look around. It seems that the FSF is recommending the Free Art licence for works of art, over the Creative Commons licences. So if I make a photograph and put it up on the web, they recommend me publishing it under the Free Art licence rather than a CC licence. But the section about art licences on the FSF's licence page is a different section from the one about documentation licences. It doesn't really make sense either, why would they recommend the Free Art licence over their own FDL? > However, reading about the FDL, it doens't sound so good. > Apparently, the FDL isn't GPL compatible or vice versa. Indeed, and it seems that Debian says that it is non-Free and won't include works licenced under the GNU FDL. This seems to be a tricky problem. The Free Art license, in its preamble, says "This is the basic aim of this Free Art License: to promote and protect artistic practice freed from the rules of the market economy." I'm not sure that that is applicable to us, or necessarily something we would want to align ourselves with either. Perhaps we can enumerate the properties that we want the licence to have, and then see if we can find one that matches that as closely as possible? I'd say that at a minimum, the licence should allow verbatim distribution, and it should allow the distribution of modified copies as long as it was plainly indicated that they were not the original document to avoid confusion. I'm not sure about whether we want a copyleft in there. If it is allowed to take a Free Design Hardware chip and put it onto a proprietary board, then I don't really see the harm in taking the documentation of that chip and making it part of the (proprietary) documentation for the board, because the whole thing would be appropriated anyway. On the other hand, there's no need to do that, they could just publish the (possibly modified) open documentation under the original licence along with their own proprietary docs, and refer to it in the secret stuff. Lourens
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