[liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: Advantages of using the Gnu Free Documentation License
- From: Christian Egli <christian.egli@xxxxxxxx>
- To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:36:28 +0200
Hi John
On Mon, 2009-10-05 at 16:59 -0500, John J. Boyer wrote:
> What would be qe advantages of using the gnu Free Documentation
> License? Disadvantages?
As you know I'm not at all opposed to GNU licenses, however with GFDL I
have my reservations. Firstly let me say that I think the (L)GPL is
probably not a very good license for documentation. I've heard stories
of publishers just taking a GPLed manual and printing it without ever
acknowledging the original author. To avoid this the GFDL was designed.
However I don't really think this is a problem for us, as I don't think
we would have a problem if anyone wanted to print and sell a manual of
liblouis. Secondly some people have a problem with the GFDL. In
particular the Debian people have voiced strong concerns about it and I
could imagine that they would rip out the documentation from the
liblouis Debian package just because it is GFDL (see the section on GFDL
in the Debian Documentation Policy
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/ddp-policy/ch-common.en.html). I see
Debian as an important customer of ours and we should try to work with
them. So to conclude I would say while the GFDL might be a better
license for documentation I don't think there is a pressing need for us
to change the license of the documentation. If you really want to change
to GFDL then at least use it without unmodifiable sections.
Thanks
Christian
--
Christian Egli
Swiss Library for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Grubenstrasse 12, CH-8045 Zürich, Switzerland
For a description of the software and to download it go to
http://www.jjb-software.com
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