Licensing for NEW documents

Hi,

Jean Weber wrote
>
> The existing user guides are licensed the same as the OOo
> guides they were derived from, and the templates include this
> licensing information on the Copyright page (GPL and CC-BY dual
> license).
>

Note that GPL applied to documentation is void, so it may as well
be removed.

Says who? Can you give me a reliable source for this?
And also, in which country?

Sigrid

Hi :slight_smile:
Hmmm, i thought i would easily find Richard Stallman's rant about the topic but it seems to have been toned-down somewhat.  The Free Software Foundation do recommend using a slightly different version and a wikipedia article points out that CC-by-SA is almost identical
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-gfdl.html
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#DocumentationLicenses
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License

Just to contradict that a little chat in LWN about the issue
http://lwn.net/Articles/394430/

Apparently the GPL does mention the word "software" but only a couple of times.  So it only needs a slight modification.  Even a slight modification makes it a non-GPL though.  Personally i think the best reason for not using the GPL is to keep all the licenses for all the official documentation the same so as to avoid confusion.

I think people want to get on with work rather than get bogged-down in chatting about legal issues which most of us have no idea about anyway.  An ill-informed consensus decision can still be 'wrong' and land us in hot water.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

In doubt stay with vitamins and excercise ... which is to say ... just do
the same we are doing until someone comes along and gives a reason not to
... at least that is MHO

Rogerio