On Tuesday 04 October 2005 19.03, C. Gatzemeier wrote: > Hi all, > > IANAL, I understand the GFDL has controversal issues > http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.html > but also see some uses for carefuly applied invariant sections that should > not prevent forking, like the list of conributors, or see below.
This license is not nearly so controversial as it seems. While the suggested text for the license notice includes mention of invariant sections and front/back cover texts (and those are in fact not what most people think they are in any case), it is only an example. If you want to use the GFDL (and it's a good license, it takes care of the special needs of writers quite nicely) then you might simply use a version of the license notice that is unequivocal: "Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License". This is the version we have been happily using for KDE docs for 5 odd years now, and other than the occasional debian user (note, never developer, lawyer, or other informed party) who writes to me in a snit, is easily mollified by the explanation that the objectionable bits are outlawed from inclusion by the very license notice in use. Drop the "or any later" if you want, it is optional. It's also usually acceptable to state that a copy of the license is provided with the source package, if you don't want to included it in the doc, which may be the case for a shorter one. Regards, -- Lauri Watts KDE Documentation: http://docs.kde.org KDE on FreeBSD: http://freebsd.kde.org _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
