The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses
The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses
Posted Oct 27, 2004 10:59 UTC (Wed) by cantsin (guest, #4420)Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses
Thanks for this excellent article which sums up the current issues of open content licenses nicely. There is, however, yet another troublesome issue for Free Software documentation released under free documentation/open content licenses, namely the incompatibility of those licenses with the GPL and BSD licenses. They become a problem in two cases:
- When the code and the document (like a manpage) are part of the same software package, so that non-free documentation could render it non-free as a whole
- more urgently, when the documentation contains code samples. If these samples are from code under the GPL or the BSD license, they can factually not be relicensed under the overall license of the documentation. This compatiblity even effects documentation under the GNU FDL that lists code released under the GNU GPL.
At the institution where I currently work, Piet Zwart Institute for Media Desig nin Rotterdam/Netherlands, we are in the final stages of putting out a 100-pages Open Content Licensing Guide which compares all existing open content licenses and describes their particular aims, advantages and drawbacks. The text was principally authored by Lawrence Liang, a lawyer and member of the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore. At the moment, I can only provide a provisional link to Lawrence's project page, but the guide will be published both in print and be downloadble under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.
Posted Oct 27, 2004 14:22 UTC (Wed)
by zlynx (guest, #2285)
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Why would that be otherwise?
Posted Oct 27, 2004 16:37 UTC (Wed)
by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
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It is a problem. Short code examples can be included based on "fair use" even when the licenses conflict, but anything more substantial cannot be moved from a GPL'd file collection to a GFDL'd file collection or vice versa without all the copyright holders agreeing to a license change.
For example, you might like the example calculator program in the Bison manual; you might want to take it, enhance it a bit, and distribute it.
But you can't mix it with any GPL'd code, and you might need a lawyer to help you figure out what you have to do to distribute the executable.
Posted Oct 27, 2004 16:44 UTC (Wed)
by kimoto (subscriber, #5244)
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Posted Oct 28, 2004 5:07 UTC (Thu)
by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
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Posted Oct 28, 2004 6:54 UTC (Thu)
by dmantione (guest, #4640)
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Posted Nov 4, 2004 8:56 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
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In practice we get away with it under common law (and bringing lawsuits is expensive - the doctrine of "loser pays" and "plaintiff pays for nuisance suits" means prosecution is unlikely).
As an example - I make a "fair use" quote. The copyright owner sues me. I offer to pay the value of the work. The owner is now in a dilemma. If he accepts my offer, he's paid hundreds of pounds of court fees and got tens of pounds in copyright fees back (I don't have to pay his costs). If he *doesn't* accept my offer, and then the judge/jury accept my offer as reasonable, he not only has to pay *his* legal costs, but *mine* *as* *well*.
Lawsuits just don't happen under those sorts of rules ...
Cheers,
Posted Nov 4, 2004 8:58 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Cheers,
Posted Oct 27, 2004 18:07 UTC (Wed)
by dlang (guest, #313)
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Posted Oct 28, 2004 9:09 UTC (Thu)
by dvrabel (subscriber, #9500)
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Posted Oct 28, 2004 22:39 UTC (Thu)
by piman (guest, #8957)
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#2 is not a problem. Code samples in documentation are obviously quotes and covered under the same rules as quoting from a text document.The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses
The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses
On debian-legal, it is often asserted that there are jurisdictions where there is no such thing as "fair use". (IANAL so can't pass judgment on that.)The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses
Such assertions are demonstrably wrong. Without fair use, you couldn't quote even the tiniest portion of a copyrighted work, or even read aloud (what? you are performing the work without the explicit permission of the copyright holder!) and I know of no country where people fear prosecution for quoting one line of a book. That shows that everyone has some concept of fair use, even if they don't call it that.
The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses
They do not exist in the EU, which is a larger market than the US. Instead the US has quotation rights, which allow you to quote from a document. It is a lot more restrictive than fair use.The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses
I'll give you an example of a jurisdiction where there is no *statutory* concept of "fair use".The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses
Wol
Whoops - I didn't say what exactly that jurisdiction was. It's pretty clearly mine, the UK.The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses
Wol
GPL version 3 is going to have some problems in solving the problem. while the 'default' GPL license is 'GPLv2 or newer' there are a number of projects (including the linux kernel) that are 'GPL v2' instead and it's going to be practicly impossilbe to get hold of all the authors to get them to agree to re-license these projects under a new license, even if that license is GPLv3The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses
Code examples in documentation should surely be public domain? They're supposed to be copied and incorperated in other programs. Perhaps the documentation license needs a clause making this explicit.The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses
More problematic is the case where the program itself contains significant portions of its documentation, like LaTeX or Emacs. In these cases, you need to move arbitrary text between the documentation and the program, not just code samples.The Grumpy Editor's guide to free documentation licenses