> Actually, that's a good question. We've had the regular go-arounds on
> HACKERs regarding code licensing (short answer: it'll stay BSD for the
> forseeable future), but never discussed documentation licenses. It
> sort of came up when Bruce's book came out, but not much was said.
The conclusion was that the docs are licensed under the same license as
the source code (simply: do whatever you want, but preserve the
BSD-style copyright notice available with the source code).
afaict, that actually did not happen for Bruce's book (no copyright
notices other than Addison Wesley). But presumably A-W will not try to
push their apparent copyright on our docs ;)
istm that a paragraph at the front with the copyright notices about
"Portions of this book are from... which is copyright..." might be
appropriate in most cases.
> For code, we've been less selective about what's in contrib than the
> core tree, isn't that the case? I count 12 occurences of files license
> under the GPL in contrib. So, for doco, do we need to make the same
> restriction?
This contribution is a standalone "article" in the DocBook sense, so
does not depend on other docs or pieces of docs. But it *does* raise
some encumbrances wrt keeping the source code available for a year after
the last formatted version is distributed. Not sure how we guarantee
that, since we don't have an official mechanism defined to preserve
tarballs etc for posterity :(
afaict, the FDL does not specifically allow one to replace a version
with a newer version, and asks that the original sources be kept intact,
at least to meet the 1 year source code rule.
otoh, someone probably has old tarballs saved (I used to, until my MO
drive failed).
- Thomas