Xfce documentation licensing

[Jim Campbell]

Hi All,

I know things have been a bit quiet on the documentation front over
the past month or so.  I've just been on hold a bit while the whole
git migration and other items got sorted out.

I did want to bring up an issue relating to licensing of
documentation, though.  If I understand correctly, up to this point
the Xfce system docs have been licensed under the GPLv2 (or later).
With the upcoming revamp of the documentation, I wanted to see if the
group would consider licensing any newly-written documentation under
the CC-By-SA v3.0 unported [0] license.

I am not a lawyer, so let me start out with one of the least-detailed
reasons for making this change possible: a good number of major doc
projects have switched to the CC-by-SA 3.0 license for their
documentation efforts, and it would make sharing content across
projects much easier.  Within the past year, Wikipedia (wiki) [1],
GNOME (system docs) [2], Fedora, and Red Hat [3] (system docs and
wiki) have all moved their doc (and / or wiki) licenses to CC-by-SA
3.0.  All of the Ubuntu system and wiki documentation is licensed as
CC-By-SA 3.0.

However, I do not see this change as favoring any one distro.  Rather,
licensing any newly written documentation as CC-by-SA would allow for
easier sharing of Xfce documentation in a variety of ways.
- For one, it would allow easier sharing of documentation with any
downstream distro that uses CC-by-SA 3.0 for their system docs.
- It would also allow, for example, a canonical statement of the
history of Xfce to be written on Wikipedia, and for that content to be
included in the Xfce documentation.
- Similarly, the content of Xfce-related blog posts that are written
under a CC-by-SA 3.0 license could be incorporated into Xfce system
documentation.
- Finally, content added to Xfce's own wiki (which is currently
licensed as CC-By-SA 3.0) would be available to include in the
documentation.

A couple of other notes:
- CC-by-SA 3.0 is considered a free documentation license by Debian
but previous versions of CC-by-SA were not considered free by Debian.
- I was at a conference this summer where they talked about some of
the downsides of using GPL for documentation, but I've copied a few of
the attendees in hopes that they could provide a bit more detail if
necessary.

As I indicated, I am not a lawyer, so I've copied several people who
have been involved in these discussions in the past in case I've left
anything out.  Please feel free to share your thoughts and concerns. I
am hopeful, though, that the group can decide to make this switch, and
make our documentation easier to share among other projects.

Jim


[0] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/  or
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update

[2] http://blogs.gnome.org/shaunm/2009/07/22/documentation-from-6000-miles/
and http://www.silwenae.org/blog/?p=1167

[3] Fedora and Red Hat's move to CC-By-SA 3.0 for docs and wiki:
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/fedora-wiki/2009-July/000176.html
and http://iquaid.org/2009/07/06/why-relicense-fedora-documentation-and-wiki-content/