[FM Discuss] License question

[Walter van Holst]

On 4/17/11 9:05 PM, John Curwood wrote:
> Hi Walter,
>
> There has been a lot of thought and discussion around what licence FLOSS
> Manuals creations should use, the reasons why GPL was chosen and why it
> does work with documentation are outlined in chapter 3 of the FLOSS
> Manuals manual
> (http://www.flossmanuals.net/floss-manuals/ch003_free-documentation).

A cursory read does not provide an explanation. The GPL is a software 
license, and is generally considered not to be appropriate for 
non-software. Ah CC-SA does effectively the same, but is also better 
suited for documents. The documentation mentions a few drawbacks of the 
FDL, which I think are right. The CC licenses are not mentioned at all.

> I'm not sure if the licence can be set to anything other than CC0 and
> GPL, but if it possible it would have to be done by and administrator
> and there would need to be good reasons made for making the change.

I would consider the inappropriateness of the GPL for anything else but 
software a perfectly good reason.

Regards,

  Walter