Re: GPL for documentation ?
Daniel Carrera wrote:
Hello,
Jeremy just had an interesting idea. About using a dual license. In my
case, I would pick GPL/CC-BY. I just emailed a couple of people with the
idea, to "test the waters".
I was hoping you could help me understand the implications of using the
GPL for documentation:
1) The GPL language talks about software. How does that apply to
something
that is not software?
IMHO, anything that is not hardware nor meatware is software :-)
2) How do I assign the GPL/CC-BY to a document? I guess the first page
of
the file would say something like "this document is released under the
GPL
and the CC-BY license ...".
Could someone help me produce a boilerplate for the license? I want to
make it as short and simple as possible.
<quote>
This document is (C) 2004-2112 Fulano de Tal <someone@example.com>, and
is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (insert
pointer to the text here), or under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution ("CC-BY") License (pointer), at the option of any part
receiving it.
</quote>
3) How do I attribute authors?
In our project, each document is reviewed and edited several times by
several different people. It's very difficult to say who changed what.
This is one of our motivations for wanting to move away from the PDL in
the first place.
Put the boilerplate in each file, in a comment (some non-visible text)
is fine IMHO, and then each person that edits some file adds its name to
the (C) thing.
The GPL doesn't seem to have any such requirement. So, how would I name
the authors? Can I get away with an appendix with a list of
contributors?
Yes, you could start with "this document is (C) its contributors as
defined in the file AUTHORS" ...
4) Is there anything I should be aware of that I forgot to ask? :-)
Thank you for your help.
Cheers,
HTH,
Massa
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