[freeroleplay] Re: License questions
- From: Ricardo Gladwell <president@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Free Roleplaying Community <freeroleplay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 17 Mar 2003 21:14:25 +0000
On Mon, 2003-03-17 at 20:52, Samuel Penn wrote:
> > First of all, the FDL was probably written without knowledge of XML
> > Schemas. I would imagine that anything that applies to DTDs, also
> > applies to schemas.
>
> This is something I assumed, and I'm pretty certain that
> what I've done matches with the 'spirit' of the FDL. However,
> lawyers make their money from points like this.
I concur, but I wouldn't stress too much about this. This isn't like the
world of d20/OGL where the slightest slip-up could have the full force
of a crack-team of Hasbro lawyers descend upon you (or at least that is
what Ryan Dancey would want you to believe :) What's important here are
not the examples the FDL gives of transparent copies, but the overall
definition of a "Transparent" copy which is as follows:
"...a machine-readable copy, represented in a format whose specification
is available to the general public, that is suitable for revising the
document straightforwardly with generic text editors..."
So, anything in ASCII/Unicode that isn't so cluttered with tags and
other computer encodings and mark-ups that it can actually be read by a
human being from the command prompt.
> The bit in the license I'm refering to is "How to use this
> License for your documents", which seems to imply a long
> copyright notice. The Wikipedia copyright notice is more
> like what I'd prefer to use.
It all rather depends: Wikipedia is a special case because it is a web
application that dynamically displays documentation stored in a
database. In the case of your own documentation, if the actual text is
shorter than the copyright notice then its may well be meaningless to
license, or even copyright it.
> The reason being to keep everything in the same style as
> the actual documentation itself. The license states that
> 'changing it is not allowed', but I assume this refers to
> the content, rather than the presentation.
I have a strong feeling that when the FSF say 'changing it is not
allowed' they are talking specifically about changing the wording of the
license - something the FSF take very seriously. After all, changing the
wording would corrupt the intentions of the license, its freedoms, etc.
See here for information of an example of when people have changed the
wording, bringing the full wrath of RMS down upon their heads:
http://www.freeroleplay.org/faq.php#OOGL
As long as the wording stays in tact, the license is complete and
clearly legible I don't think they'll mind if you print it all in Comic
Sans (of course, the rest of us might raise some objections here :)
> Thanks to both you and Jerry for your replies. I'll try
> the FSF again, and let you know how I get on.
>
> I hate legal stuff :-(
Don't we all :) Good luck...
--
Ricardo Gladwell
President, Free Roleplaying Community
http://www.freeroleplay.org/
president@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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