ubuntu-doc licensing (was Re: Future direction of Ubuntu Documentation/Meeting times)

[Matthew East]

On Fri, 2005-07-29 at 14:47 -0400, Matt Galvin wrote:
> On 7/29/05, Sean Wheller <sean at inwords.co.za> wrote:
> > On Friday 29 July 2005 05:26, George Deka wrote:
> > > I realise that the debian accepting our docs is a big issue.
> > >  In terms of licences, we have been through this before, but i too would
> > > like to see a change. Maybe using the GFDL like this
> > >
> > >  Permission is granted to copy, distribute, and/or modify this document
> > > under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any
> > > later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
> > > Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the
> > > license is available at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html.
> > >
> > >  Which i think would be acceptable to debian, fedora doc-team use this
> > > licence as does diveintopython.
> > 
> > This is not a decision for now. Focus on writing the documents, please.
> 
> I don't think I really have much to add that has not already been
> said. I will only say that at this stage in the release cycle(and
> being that these decisions were already made a while ago) we should be
> focusing our energy on writing what we said we would write and having
> this content ready for the breezy release.
> 
> Of course new ideas are always welcome but maybe some(the bigger ones
> especially) of these new ideas should possibly go on to some sort of a
> "docs breezy+1 wish list" so that we can complete out work now and
> still be able to keep track of things we would all like to do that (at
> this stage) should really be pushed to breezy+1.

FWIW I have no problem with reconsidering our licensing at this stage in
the release process, or afterwards. I also have no objection to a change
in our licence.

One thing that has always bothered me about our docs is the listing of
the authors at the top: I find this unnecessary and also (in the case of
docs with more than a couple of authors) really unpleasant to look at
(e.g. the ubuntu userguide). I believe a simple Ubuntu Documentation
Project would do the trick. This is after all a community effort. The
simple fact is that the users (who are the target of the documentation)
really don't want to know the individuals, they want to access the
documentation. If half the first page is taken up by names, they'll get
put off.

I am not an expert on open source licensing but I thought I would voice
my view on this thread, and encourage others to do so as well. Just
because we are working on docs now, and we have deadlines, it doesn't
mean discussions like this should not take place on the mailing list.

M
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