Re: gnome summary

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On 27 Oct 1999, Jochem Huhmann wrote:
>  > 
>  > looks like i've gotten TR to agree to post the gnome summaries on the
>  > site!  the thing is that they will want to make the 'look' of them fit
>  > with the standard TR (that's techrepublic) look.  without changing any of
>  > the text (unless there is gramatical editing needed) does anyone have a
>  > problem with this?
> 
> Would be nice to see those things GPL'ed and have this stated there.
> 
> I've just discovered http://www.opencontent.org/ which has a few
> points on that.
> 

I have no problem with people reprinting the summaries; please do so, feel
free to fix spelling, etc.

However, they should not be modified in any substantive way. I am happy to
release my GGAD book under a license that allows modification; technical
manuals should allow modification and that's a good thing. But licenses
that allow modification make very little sense for opinion pieces, news,
and that kind of stuff, as the original free documentation advocate
Richard Stallman will be happy to point out (at least, that's my
impression of his views).

Also, the GPL is inappropriate for documentation; there are far too many
docs under the GPL, which makes no sense. The FSF does not even GPL its
docs, though the docs are under a free license. The GPL mentions
_software_ explicitly, you can't expect courts to apply it to docs via
some weird metaphorical extension. You want a free license for docs but
the GPL is not it.

So, in short: 
 - Use OPL or the FSF's documentation license for technical manuals
   Do not use GPL
 - There is no rational reason I can think of why non-technical texts
   should be freely modifiable

Sorry, this confusion is just a peeve of mine. :-)

Havoc