As of now, our docs do not have an official license. This is prolly a Bad Thing considering work that people contribute to the documentation are not protected and reside in the public domain.
As a result and as a precursor to submitting a TIP, I would like to start a discussion about what is the most appropriate license for the community's official documentation.
Our options are:
- GPL - More or less the same as GPL for code; viral license, copyleft, etc. The Debian project has announced it will only distribute documentation in its base install that is GPL
- GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) - Most of it free as in GPL except for sections that the author deems invariant. An invariant section is a part that is protected from being changed or removed in derivative or distributed works. For instance, if an author writes documentation and adds a paragraph or two about why he licenses the code under the GPL then he can mark it as invariant so that all future copies of the documentation must contain that section.
- A Creative Commons license - Someone with a greater understanding of what the CC is doing should post here, but AFAIK we can create our own license that is a mix of the community's preferred license protections.
discussion begins.
BTW, this is not to say that people cannot write their own documentation that is licensed as something other than what the community decides upon. That doc just will not be distributed as a part of the OpenACS official documentation.
talli
