[FM Discuss] license thread

[Delirium]

Julian Oliver wrote:
> some of the CC licenses (esp if you use the word 'any') might present the 
> downstream problem of the work being re-licensed in a way that doesn't favour 
> FLOSSManuals later. while you can say "provided you permit [..]" this doesn't
> afford any protection in the event of legal bridges between licenses in
> future - there are always loopholes.
>   

Kind of related to this, I recently discovered that even the CC licenses 
that seemed to me to be free-software licenses (cc-by and cc-by-sa) are 
rejected by Debian as not meeting the Debian Free Software Guidelines, 
due to some problematic clauses. There is a summary of the debate over 
v2.0 here: http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary.html, and an even 
longer summary of the (still-unresolved) debate over v3.0 here: 
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Version_3#Debian

That would present the practical problem that if any major FLOSSmanuals 
manuals ended up primarily CC licensed, they might not be distributable 
through one of the main distribution venues for free software. On the 
other hand, CC licenses are very popular for media-content creators, 
which leaves a bit of a mess.

I'm starting to think Adam's original idea of just GPL'ing everything 
isn't a bad idea. All the options have downsides, but that one seems 
like it would still allow the majority of intended purposes (are people 
really going to be remixing manuals with cc-by-sa artwork or 
something?), and just sticking with one license has the benefit of being 
simpler (and simpler to explain).

-Mark