[Preston] GFDL not free?

[Andrew King]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 09:22:28PM +0000, Matthew T. Atkinson wrote:
 
> I have just read a posting by Thomas Bushnell (of HURD fame).  He spoke
> out against the GFDL because he believes the licence is essentially not
> free (in the GNU sense).  Then RMS ``dismissed'' him as HURD maintainer.

Wow... seems a bit harsh.
 
> Its not this disagreement per se that made me e-mail about this - it is
> that I am now concerned about using the GFDL as a licence for the
> documentation I am (and will be) producing to go along with GPL'd
> software.

I've read the GFDL, and don't understand why the complexity is necessary - or
many of the restrictions it imposes.  

Have a look at the licenses available at http://creativecommons.org/.  I'd
be tempted to go for the Attribution only license - it basically says that peopel
can do anything with your docs except claim they wrote it.  Even this looks
a bit complex though (when you look at the actual license text rather than
the summary).

Even simpler is a BSD-style license: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ln16.html

> I am concerned because I want my software to go into Debian eventually
> but it says in that mail that Debian won't distribute GFDL'd manuals.  I
> am not using any ``Invariant Sections'' in my manual so I think it might
> not be all that bad, but I don't like the idea that you can't copy code
> from a GFDL'd manual into GPL'd software.  The post also mentions
> restrictions on the formats you have to produce your manual in, but I
> never picked up on that when reading the GFDL.

IIRC the GFDL talks about transparent and not-transparent formats or something, and gives a few examples of formats that are okay and not okay.  I guess this is to say things like Adobe eBooks can't have DRM restrictions on them.

> Here is the posting I read:
> http://lists.softwarelibero.it/pipermail/discussioni/2003-November/008465.html
> 
> I'm just wondering what your thoughts on this are, really.  If any of
> you have had much experience (good or bad) with the GFDL I'd like to
> know about it.  I have already released some stuff under the GFDL but as
> I am the author/copyright holder I don't suppose it would be a problem
> for me to re-release under the GPL or some other licence instead.

Yea, that's fine, you're in the unique position to do that :)  You could make something available on the Net for free under the GPL but then at the same time go round selling it to businesses for thousands under some really restrictive terms.  On a similar kind of thing, I've often wondered if I could make a million by selling GPL'd software to businesses just by kind of selling it to them in the right way and saying "there's the license" and then hoping they don't read it 'til I've been paid.  I think you could do that and still comply with the GPL.
 
Andrew