documentation

[Rob Myers]

IANAL

On Tuesday, August 28, 2001, at 04:56  pm, email at greglondon.com wrote:

> someone did mention the QPL license earlier.
> I looked at it, but my concern is that it
> uses the word "software" everywhere.

If the license isn't copyrighted, just search & replace. Or define "the 
software" to be your document.

> There's also the notion of "patches" in QPL,
> and that could be widely interpreted when
> applied to a Word document.

So define "patches" when defined to your document. "Ammendments" is a 
concept you mention

> I've considered writing the document as a perl
> program, such that the program dumps the text
> to the screen. And then license the program as QPL.
> That might be an option, but then I lose any
> formating information and images that may have
> been in the Word document.

You could just write a Perl program to dump the Word document. I'm not 
sure that either approach provides the protection you're after.

> as far as Artistic License goes, it has the same
> problems by refering to "software". Plus, isn't it
> pretty much agreed that it's a shaky license?
> I know they're intending on rewriting it for Perl 6.

There's a revised artistic license available that addresses the concerns 
IIRC.

> And all of this just because there's
> no license for Word documents, PDF's, etc.

There's various open content/documentation licenses. The Open Gaming 
License is the most complete I know of, but you'd need to remove the 
word "game/gaming" from it (and it's not OSI approved,of course).

> Rather than simply have a documentaion license,
> I have to do a bunch of work to make my document
> look like software so I can license it with an
> OSI approved license. It just seems odd to me.

It is. Just define your document as "the software" or do 
search-and-replace. Or let go of having an OSI approved license.

IANAL, as I say.

- Rob.
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