On Wed, Jun 12, 2002 at 02:42:31PM -0500, Joe Wreschnig wrote: > > How about making it compatible with the GPL? It would be really nice > > to be able to take documentation and put it into a program, and vice > > versa. [...] > Perhaps it could be made compatible with a clause "Any section not > marked as an Immutable/Invariant/Unchangeable/Whatever they are called > if they exist section may be relicensed under the GNU GPL or GNU LPGL, > version 2 or later, as published by the Free Software Foundation." > Actually, it would probably be better to just take the wording from the > LGPL section 3 and change "a given copy of the Library" to "any > non-Invariant section of the Document." and change the last bit to > mention documents instead of libraries as well. Yes, I was pondering a "convertibility" clause. In other words, you could "import" a DFCL-licensed document into GPL'ed sources by permitting it to be relicensed under the GPL (or LGPL) for inclusion in a software product. I don't think this would invite abuse because most traditional paper publishers don't find the GNU (L)GPL convenient for documentation; they don't want to make the 3-year written offer to provide a CD-ROM with the FrameMaker document source (for example) at cost. However, an Invariant section, even if severable, still has DFSG problems. Copyright notices, license text, and something akin to the FDL 1.2 draft's "endorsements" are about as far as I'm willing to go. For arbitrary invariant sections, even if they're removable, I think people need to be steered towards another license. This doesn't mean we can't make suggestions to authors about how achieve their goals. It is my intention to draft a FAQ in parallel with this license document so that much important discussion can be placed there, and not clutter up the license text itself. -- G. Branden Robinson | The noble soul has reverence for Debian GNU/Linux | itself. branden@debian.org | -- Friedrich Nietzsche http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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