Free documentation licenses

[kmself at ix.netcom.com]

on Mon, Nov 27, 2000 at 08:13:58AM -0500, John Cowan (cowan at locke.ccil.org) wrote:
> On Sun, 26 Nov 2000, David Johnson wrote:
> 
> > 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. 
> 
> IMHO it makes sense to release a manual under the same license as the
> software, so that it can be changed in synchrony with the software.
> What you have here looks like a close variant of new-BSD.  If you are
> releasing the software under new-BSD, then use new-BSD as the
> documentation license as well.

I'm not sure license conformance between software and documentation is
necessary for synchrony.  There might be reasons for making
documentation licensing more or less restrictive than software
licensing.  Unless there is inclusion of significant code in the
documentation, the issue of compatability may simply be immaterial.

In the general case, if the documentation is to be freely
redistributable to a large license, a license which allows distribution
under terms at least as liberal as the software license should be
sufficient.

David's license is largely similar to a BSD/MIT license, and looks on
first glance to be relatively reasonable.  I gather that the strong
persistance features of the GPL are not of interest to him. 

The one benefit to conformant licensing I can see is that the downstream
distributer/modifier doesn't have to deal with multiple sets of
licensing terms in deciding how the work or derived works can be
(re)distributed.

IANAL, this is not legal advice.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>     http://www.netcom.com/~kmself
 Evangelist, Zelerate, Inc.                      http://www.zelerate.org
  What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?      There is no K5 cabal
   http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/        http://www.kuro5hin.org
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