Advices on choosing a documentation license for an upstream project

2003-11-04 Thread Arnaud Quette

[@ -legal: please cc me on reply as I'm not subscribed]

Hi folks,

We (Network UPS Tools project) are currently
looking at creating a complete documentation
set using docbook, for output formats and i18n
reasons.

This improvement in the upstream will, by side
effect, (re)create a nut-doc package in Debian.

Knowing that:
- NUT is a pure GPL project, thus we need a _free_
documentation licence,
- GFDL seems to be to doc what GPL is to source code,
so it seems the good choice for our aim,
- the current consensus on -legal is that GFDL isn't DFSG
compliant in its current form (from what I've read in the
Debian Statement about GFDL and -devel),
- Debian is our GNU/Linux reference distribution for
several reasons, and we don't want nut packages to
be split between main and non-free!
- however, if choosing GFDL, the RM won't consider
it as an RC bug (so not blocking for sarge/future stable),
- the FSF steps about modifying GFDL might not occur
before long (a year seems, according to RMS main
focus on GPL V3)

So, what are your advices about choosing a _free_
documentation licence for NUT?

Thanks for your constructive advices, and
please, don't start any flamewar as it's not
the aim of this mail.

Arnaud Quette
---
DD (nut, wmnut, knutclient)
Upstream developer Team of NUT
...
---
References:
- NUT upstream: http://www.exploits.org/nut/
- NUT Sid packages: 
http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_packages.pl?keywords=nutsearchon=namessubword=1version=unstablerelease=all
- Debian Statement about GFDL: 
http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml




Re: Advices on choosing a documentation license for an upstream project

2003-11-04 Thread Brian T. Sniffen
Arnaud Quette [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 [@ -legal: please cc me on reply as I'm not subscribed]

 Hi folks,

 We (Network UPS Tools project) are currently
 looking at creating a complete documentation
 set using docbook, for output formats and i18n
 reasons.

That's great.  Thanks.

 This improvement in the upstream will, by side
 effect, (re)create a nut-doc package in Debian.

 Knowing that:
 - NUT is a pure GPL project, thus we need a _free_
 documentation licence,
 - GFDL seems to be to doc what GPL is to source code,
 so it seems the good choice for our aim,
 - the current consensus on -legal is that GFDL isn't DFSG
 compliant in its current form (from what I've read in the
 Debian Statement about GFDL and -devel),
 - Debian is our GNU/Linux reference distribution for
 several reasons, and we don't want nut packages to
 be split between main and non-free!
 - however, if choosing GFDL, the RM won't consider
 it as an RC bug (so not blocking for sarge/future stable),

The RM won't consider existing GFDL documents to be RC bugs.  New GFDL
documents might or might not be approved, and in the interests of
minimizing later headaches, I'd suggest avoiding that license.

Non-free documentation almost certainly will be RC at woody+2.

 - the FSF steps about modifying GFDL might not occur
 before long (a year seems, according to RMS main
 focus on GPL V3)

 So, what are your advices about choosing a _free_
 documentation licence for NUT?

Well, given you talk about being a pure GPL project, why not put your
documentation under the GPL as well?  Even if you were writing in
plain text or in a WYSIWYG program, it's a reasonable choice.  But
given you're writing in docbook, with a very clear
source-compiled-to-object mapping, the GPL is a great choice for a
free documentation license.

It has the added advantage of being GPL-compatible: that is, you *and
the recipients* can freely move data between the program and the
documentation.  This makes writing and examples easy and productive.

-Brian

 Thanks for your constructive advices, and
 please, don't start any flamewar as it's not
 the aim of this mail.

 Arnaud Quette
 ---
 DD (nut, wmnut, knutclient)
 Upstream developer Team of NUT
 ...
 ---
 References:
 - NUT upstream: http://www.exploits.org/nut/
 - NUT Sid packages:
 http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_packages.pl?keywords=nutsearchon=namessubword=1version=unstablerelease=all
 - Debian Statement about GFDL:
 http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml

-- 
Brian T. Sniffen[EMAIL PROTECTED]
   http://www.evenmere.org/~bts/