[FM Discuss] license thread

[adam hyde]

how about licensing with :

"You may use this material with any CC or FSF license provided you
permit FLOSS Manuals to use any modified or derivative work."

would that solve it?

adam



On Thu, 2007-08-09 at 00:05 -0700, Delirium wrote:
> adam hyde wrote:
> > My proposal then, is that we use the flexibility we have, as the
> > copyright owners to allow anyone to use the content under any CC or FSF
> > license. This means it can be used under the GPL (which is good for
> > developers), the FDL (which means it is good for wikipedia etc), the CC
> > licenses (which means it is is good for use by bloggers, on websites
> > etc).
> >
> > This would be something like a license (eg .TRFL - 'the really free
> > license' ;). 
> >
> > So the content would be covered with something like:
> > "(c) [author] you may use this material with any CC or FSF license"
> >
> > I can visualise some kind of image that could be placed on each page, -
> > somehting like the Creative Commons images, with a gnu and a (cc) side
> > by side with a 'tick' over each to show we approve of both.
> >
> > So this would mean we are 'outwardsly compatible' ie. anyone could use
> > our content under a CC/FSF license. I mean we want to ensure as many
> > people as possible get to use free software (right?), so lets not
> > inhibit that aim by being caught up in these license stand offs.
> >
> > To preserve the floss manuals content we might then make a copy of all
> > floss manuals material periodically and keep it on our servers and use
> > the GPL to cover it. This means it is free forever.
> >   
> 
> Well, there are some pros and cons here. The pro, as you mention, is 
> that more licenses means more reuse. The two cons, though, are:
> 
> 1) Multi-licensing has the inherent pitfall that if some downstream 
> reuser chooses to use the content under only one of the licenses and not 
> multi-license their edits, their modified version can't be reintegrated 
> into the original multi-licensed version. For example, if someone took a 
> work-in-progress manual, imported it into Wikibooks under the GFDL, and 
> polished it up to a nice work, the improvements couldn't be reintegrated 
> back into flossmanuals unless flossmanuals were willing to use just the 
> GFDL for that manual.
> 
> 2) If there are non-copyleft licenses as options among the multiple 
> licenses, then a downstream reuser can basically "take it proprietary", 
> refusing to freely license their modified version of the manual. For 
> example, a company could use a flossmanuals manual under cc-by as the 
> basis for a commercial manual, and keep their improvements proprietary, 
> since the only thing cc-by requires is that they credit the original 
> authors, not that they freely license their own contributions too 
> (cc-by-sa adds that requirement).
> 
> A strategy that would avoid #2 (but not #1) would be to multi-license 
> under only copyleft licenses, probably GPL, GFDL, and cc-by-sa. For what 
> it's worth, Wikimedia Commons' suggested license for users uploading 
> their own media is similar: dual-licensed under GFDL and cc-by-sa 
> (probably only missing GPL because nobody realizes it can apply to 
> non-code).
> 
> -Mark
> 
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-- 


adam hyde
floss manuals

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http://www.flossmanuals.net

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email : adam at flossmanuals.net