Re: License FAQs

At 02:39 PM 2/21/2004 +0100, you wrote:
>On Sat, Feb 21, 2004 at 08:17:28AM -0500, georgina o. economou wrote:
> > ?One thing that would be helpfull clarifying would be : do you 
> consider >documentation as software or not. I know there is a bunch of 
> people who >consider everything that comes in digital form as software, 
> while other don't.
> >
> > >So either way, it would be nice to add this clarification to the place 
> where ?>you speak about artwork.
>
>Please, fix your email client to something who know how to quote. Most
>of your email is seen as only garbage by most people.
> >
> > That's a valid point about the FDL and documentation. Even 
> CreativeCommons recommends the FDL: ( 
> http://creativecommons.org/learn/licenses/ )
>
>No, this is not the problem. What i was hinting at is that, the
>documentation being or not being software is a quite controversial
>subject in the licencing issue actually discussed, and actually one in
>which debian is quite in conflict with the FSF, but let's not enter in
>that. So, may point was asking, since you don't consider artwork as
>software with regard to the acknowledgement, what is your position on
>documentation. Let's say a linux distribution distributes a piece of
>documentation and provides third party aknowledgement for it, do they
>have to add a XFree86 aknowelgement notice along side it, or not, even
>if the piece of documentation is totally unrelated, maybe being a book
>shipped on the same CD as X, or whatever.
>
>A simple clarification of in which category XFree86 places
>documentation, along the lines of your clarification on artwork,
>probably cited there because of the OpenBSD CD distribution, or
>something such, don't remember exactly who it was, would help clarify
>that doubt for me.
>
> > _If you are interested in licensing software documentation or other 
> supporting text for a piece of code, we recommend the GNU Free 
> Documentation License._
>
>Please don't. The GFDL is in general considered non DFSG free by the
>debian-legal people. Because of the invariant sections i think,


yes i would think so and in particular since you can make the whole
blasted thing invariant.  the fsf says it's working on getting  commercial
publishers to ack this new work, if that's a consideration.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-gfdl.html

and the actual license in question.  i of course support it as i think
it could help and re-write copyright law.


http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.txt


mark.