Re: GPL as a license for documentation: What about derived works?

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Thank you, Andrew, Michael, MJ and Raul for your comments. 

I was asking this question because I got involved in a license
discussion with an author who published a preliminary version of a
document on a "preliminary" licsense, the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0. 

During the discussion, he asked for a recommendation for a free license
for his text, should he wish to distribute it.

He seemed to be concerned about other people making "unfair use" of the
text (without having any real clue about what is "fair use"
probably). And he was clearly looking for something that would bind
everybody to use the same free conditions for texts based on it: He was
objecting to putting it into public domain.

I hope I have understood most of the things you wrote, and it seems
clearer to me now what you can do, and what you can't do, by releasing a
text under GPL.

But still there's a lot of cruft in it that might be just confusing for
an author who considers GPL for his text, or even add confusion to a
possible lawsuit.

Would it be possible to create something like a reduced form of the GPL,
with "program" replaced by "text", "object code" by "typeset form", and
with all the executable-specific cruft rippeed off (or replaced)?

With such a license I would hope that we could convince individual
authors to switch from GFDL to this GPL-doc (of course not the FSF...). 

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer