Xfce documentation licensing

[Vincent]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 8:42 AM, Brian J. Tarricone <brian at tarricone.org>wrote:

> On 08/17/2009 05:23 PM, Jim Campbell wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> Personally I'm fine with it for anything I've written, but remember that
> this isn't a "group" decision.  The Right Thing[tm] to do here is to
> look at the authorship information for each module's documentation and
> contact all of those authors individually.  You can't relicense the docs
> for a particular module until all its authors agree, unless you want to
> rewrite substantial portions of it from scratch.
>

AFAICS Jim only proposed to adopt this license for newly-written docs, but
it would be a good idea to look at the authorship of pre-existing docs as
well.

Also, perhaps it could be looked into whether the copyright could be
transferred to "The Xfce Project" in general, to make relicensing or
defending copyright easier in the future. Additionally, the Attribution
should also be taken into account.

Personally, I think incorporating information from the sources Jim mentioned
is far more important than including the occasional code snippet. That
sounds far less useful except for maybe developer docs, which you could
still decide to keep licensed under GPLv2. Alternatively, you could choose
to explicitly state alongside each code snippet that another license applies
than to the rest of the documentation.


>
>        -brian
>

Best,
-- 
Vincent
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