Gregory Leblanc (gleblanc@cu-portland.edu)
Thu, 27 Jan 2000 08:02:25 -0800
David Lawyer wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jan 25, 2000 at 08:42:08PM -0500, Paul M. Foster wrote:
> > The whole point of any license along this line needs to be to protect the
> > consumer. For the most part no one cares whether you copy or sell their
> > man/info pages or whatever. However, everyone would like to be sure that
> > if they're looking at the documentation for something, that it does
> > accurately represent the product it's documenting. That means you don't
> > want it indiscriminately altered by someone else. Imagine Microsoft
> > getting into this market and "polluting" the Linux documentation with
> > "doctored" man pages. So if you're going to alter the docs, you have to
> > get permission from the copyright holder or maintainer.
>
> First, the scenario of Microsoft distorting free documents is
> unrealistic. If they got caught doing this they would get in much
> more trouble than they are already in. There is however the problem
> of someone doing a poor job of modifying it. An example would be
> where an editor for a publishing Co. who knows little about the
> subject edits the work before publishing and makes some mistakes.
> I've seen this happen.
>
> At the same time, free documents sometimes becomes unmaintained. The
> author may become ill (or even die), not have time to work on it
> anymore, enter a new field of endeavor, etc. But if the license
> doesn't give permission for others to modify it, then it's bad for
> consumers. A point made by Stallman was for the case where someone
> modified some software and thus had an immediate need to modify its
> documentation without having time to contact the copyright owner.
>
> Thus for documentation to be truly free, I think that anyone must
> ultimately have the right to modify it if there is a significant need
> to do so (such as it not being adequately maintained). Stallman goes
> further than this and would give anyone the right to modify it,
> period. One advantage of Stallman's position is that it's simple to
> put into a license. How would one determine if there is a
> "significant need"?
>
> What I propose as an alternative is to require that anyone who
> modifies a document and then allows it to be distributed would need to
> do the following: email a notice (or copy) of the modification to the
> email address of the copyright owner as given in the latest version of
> the document. It would also be suggested that the modifier should
> make contact with the copyright owner (usually the author) prior to
> any significant modifications. It's very desirable that the author
> and the modifier cooperate. It might be the case that the author is
> about to release a new versions that would make the proposed
> modification unnecessary. Perhaps the author would agree to proofread
> the modified version, etc.
>
> There's also a significant need for a single license for technical
> documentation even if that means compromising some on what one thinks
> a license should contain.
You make a number of good points here, which I tend to agree with. I
would love for there to be a single license for technical documentation,
and I've seen a lot of good discussions on the license that RMS has
written. After all this talk, I'm getting tired of having to think this
hard about licensing, but there are still a couple of things that I
don't agree with in the license. The first one is requiring the license
to be in the text of the document. This license is long, and hard to
read, I don't want it cluttering up the text of my technical document.
If I can distribute the license WITH my document (as in attached, or
whatnot), with a pointer saying to read the license that came with it,
then that works. The other item I can think of right now is
modification. I understand the reluctance that RMS has to putting
anything in the license about having modifiers notify the author of the
document, but this isn't quite the same as free software where things
like notification are concerned. I've been working on re-writing a
really good reference guide that's basically free documentation, and I
held off on getting started for a long time trying to find out how the
original author felt about updating/changing his work. If someone else
is going to change my work, then I'd really like them to at least make
an effort to notify me. I suppose I'll have to go back and look at it
again later today to see what I missed. Thanks,
Greg
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Thu Jan 27 2000 - 12:04:36 EST