Free documentation licenses

[David Johnson]

I am in the process of writing a user manual and did some checking around for 
appropriate free licenses. Unfortunately, I didn't find anything suitable. 
The GFDL is just too much and contains undesired restrictions. Other licenses 
listed on the GNU page were not applicable either, for pretty much the same 
reasons listed by RMS. The Nupedia license is also unacceptable for various 
reasons. Variations of any of the above might work.

So, any alternatives out there that I missed? I'm thinking of writing my own 
if there is no alternative available. In such a case, a very rough draft 
follows. I want something short, simple and to the point. I was thinking of 
some form of weak copyleft, but I don't know how applicable it would be to a 
document since the content would always be available. I'm also wondering 
whether an attribution requirement would cause any problems.

---
[Free Text License]
Copyright (c) <YEAR>, <OWNER> 
All rights reserved.

Redistribution of this document, with or without modification, is permitted 
provided that the following conditions are met:

Redistributions must retain the above copyright notice, this list of 
conditions and the following disclaimer.

Redistributions must not misrepresent the authorship of this document.

Neither the name of the author(s) nor the names of its contributors may be 
used to endorse or promote products derived from this document without 
specific prior written permission.

THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' 
WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED 
TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR 
PURPOSE.

-- 
David Johnson
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http://www.usermode.org