[kde-guidelines] Licenses

[Lauri Watts]

On Sunday 03 October 2004 20.05, zander at kde.org wrote:

> Since Frans answered I got reminded that I was kind of expecting an email
> from you with a "Oops, now _with_ attachment"...
>

Aargh.

I was going to point to the doc primer url instead, this is probably quicker 
though:
Basically the FDL has three versions:
* no restrictions at all on reproduction other than maintaining copyright 
information  (This is the version KDE users)

* with invariant sections - sections that are named in the front matter, and 
if reproduced must be reproduced verbatim, with *no changes* and named as 
such in the front matter of the doc reproducing the content.  This is the one 
that upsets GPL adherents for obvious reasons. 

* with front cover/back cover texts - notices, often similar to the 
"advertising clause" in the old BSD license, that are named, and must be kept 
in the front/back matter of the document if we quote anything out of the 
document directly.

None of these are too big a deal for a document that doesn't need to be 
distributed with KDE.  The Invariant sections can be a big pain when 
distributing, since they are generally considered to render a document 
"non-free" (and if you google for people who are very against the FDL,  it's 
this flavour of it that is the problem.)

The front cover/back cover texts can be distasteful (for instance there's a 
very nice book length document published under the FDL that we would dearly 
like to reuse some of the content from for KDE user manuals, but won't, 
because it has an entire page of advertising for commercial software products 
and printed matter included as 'front matter')

It's obviously ok to reference documents externally, and none of this will 
matter (we do need to keep an eye on a regular basis that links are still 
correct etc.).  The issue is quoting external documents in ours.

But all this is why it's important to know the actual license of any documents 
we may want to cite from (Fair Use gives some leeway, but probably not 
enough.)

As far as copyright goes, I guess you and I are both on the same page there.  
I would suggest all copyright holders as well as being listed in the front 
matter as normal, are noted on a section by section basis (as a comment, if 
not visible, it's fairly easy to make it visible too) just for future 
management purposes.   We also normally list all contributors to the 
document, including those who don't directly hold any copyright 
(copy-editing, review, comments, etc) in a credits chapter or appendix.

Regards,
-- 
Lauri Watts
KDE Documentation: http://docs.kde.org
KDE on FreeBSD: http://freebsd.kde.org
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