Sec: Unclassified RE: How and why to start hacking Ubuntu Help

[Sean Wheller]

On Monday 01 August 2005 02:19, Stoffers, Robert LAC wrote:
> I have also noticed in revision 0.5 of the FAQ Guide it states "Add author
> credit to Abdullah Ramazanoglu for Kubuntu version of guide". He is the
> author of KUDOS, as far as I'm aware nothing from KUDOS has been included
> in the KDE profile of the FAQ Guide yet (there are Kubuntu sections, but we
> have written them). Kubuntu is mostly on our TODO list for the FAQ Guide,
> although I remember someone offering to contribute to the Kubuntu profile a
> little while ago. KUDOS is solely licensed under the GFDL, we will need to
> ask Abdullah Ramazanoglu to licence it under the CC-BY-SA and also under
> the GPL if we want to go that way. It might be worth bringing a copy of
> KUDOS into the svn once we have done this and using it to add to the
> Kubuntu profile of the FAQ Guide.

A few months back Chen Wen Kait and Abdullah Ramazanoglu agreed to release a 
copy their works under the GFDL and CC-BY-SA 2.0. These messages can be found 
in the list archives.

The decision to use GFDL and CC-BY-SA 2.0 is one taken by Canonical and sabdfl 
under consultation of mako.

At present I can see no reason to change any of the documentation licenses. 
Perhaps there is some motivating reason or benefit behind why there is a 
sudden will to change licenses. 

If people wish to change license, then I suggest that they consider dialog 
with Canonical and mako and all authors current and historical.

Before taking this action, please review and discuss the license declaration
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocteamLicense In particular,
"Documents under a GFDL or CC-BY incompatible license will not be able to be 
combined with the core documents. Additionally, documents released under a 
single license (i.e., either GFDL or CC-BY-SA) are essentially forking from 
the duality regime of the documentation source-code base. Once released under 
a single license such works cannot be merged back under the dual license 
regime. As a result, such works will need to be excluded from any derivative 
works covered under the dual regime or the regime of the unused license. 
Unless expressly specified by the author, all document code-source 
contributions and their derivative works will be made available under the 
conditions of both licenses."

This would imply that a change to license is more wide spread than any one 
document. That is if people wish to have compatability between documents.

Since I cannot see any great benefit to be derived from a change, I am not 
sure that this is a very productive exercise. The project would be better 
served if the licenses were left as is and team just focused on writing.


-- 
Sean Wheller
Technical Author
sean at inwords.co.za
084-854-9408
http://www.inwords.co.za
Registered Linux User #375355
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/attachments/20050801/1cde5854/attachment.pgp>