The Software Freedom Law Show

Episode 0x16: Documentation Licensing and the Google Books Settlement Objection

15 September 2009

Karen and Bradley discuss issues surrounding the licensing of software documentation, and FSF's objection to the Google Books Proposed Settlement.

This show was released on Tuesday 15 September 2009; its running time is 00:50:41.

Bradley mentioned the topic for this show was suggested on identi.ca (01:15) by Dan Scott (01:39) who works on a project called Evergreen (02:36)
Dan had asked earlier about FaiF documentation licenses. (03:04) Bradley met him at FSOSS, which is held at Seneca at York. (Bradley misspoke during the podcast and confused Seneca and York.) (01:30)
Bradley talked about this history of the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL). (04:40)
Bradley mentioned the (mostly) defunct Open Publication License. (05:37)
Karen referenced the Debian decision about FDL. (06:20)
The FDL allows for invariant sections. (10:50)
Debian decided that invariant sections are not DFSG-free. (11:20)
FSF released GNU FDL 1.3 to allow relicensing of some FDL works under CC-By-SA. FSF's announced this in November 2008 and Bradley blogged about it. (19:00)
FSF does have a discussion draft of the GNU Simpler Free Documentation License available. (22:03)
Bradley recommends licensing documentation under (GPLv3-or-later|CC-By-SA-2.0-or-later) or (GPLv3-or-later|FDL-2.1-or-later|CC-By-SA-2.0-or-later). (28:00, 32:05)
Bradley restated his hatred for the term “dual licensing” because of its ambiguity. He refers to the above as “disjunctive dual licensing” (30:10)
Bradley and Karen mentioned they will talk about public domain eventually, but for the moment, people should look at CC-0. (32:30)
Karen says we'll do the public domain show before Episode 0xDEAD, which would be our 57,006th show.

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