Re: Documenting Gnome apps with the GPL

[Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>]

    It's at least
    2 pages just for the licence. I prefer to preserve trees and keep the
    documentation under the same licences as the rest of the package.

I obtained the tar file of libxml-doc.  According to wc -l, the HTML
files there add up to around 140,000 lines, which would be over 2000
pages if printed.  Even supposing that half of the lines in the HTML
don't correspond to real text lines, that would still be over 1000
pages.

Against that background, it doesn't seem to make sense to make such a
fuss about a few more pages for the GFDL.  The libxslt documentation
seems to have about 3700 lines.  Not a giant tome, but still much
bigger than the GFDL.

On the other hand, there do exist documentation files which are not
much bigger than the GFDL.  For those files, we recommend using a
simple all-permissive license instead.  It is no great loss if such a
small documentation file is non-copylefted.  Combining several
of these files into one larger file can also often be a good idea.