Self-Introduction: Timothy Murphy

[Timothy Murphy]

On Thursday 20 December 2007 02:41:40 am Rahul Sundaram wrote:

> >> Note that Linux Home Server Howto is under a different license than OPL
> >> without options which is what the documentation project uses. If you are
> >> planning to copy paste content from the HowTo, you would need explicit
> >> permission to relicense.
> >
> > Well, I haven't sold my soul to the Fedora Documentation Project.
>
> I have no idea what this means and it's relevance to what I said.

I think what I said is reasonably clear.
But to put it brutally:
it doesn't seem to me to matter greatly
if a document does or does not come within the auspices
of the Fedora Documentation Project.
I doubt if it makes much difference to those who read it.

This HOWTO _is_ a Fedora-oriented document,
so the Document Project is a fairly natural place for it to live.

> Maybe  you have a misunderstanding.

I don't think so.

> I am merely pointing out a licensing 
> requirement. If you are deriving your work from existing content, you
> need a explicit permission from the original authors to relicense it.
> This is true regardless of whether you work with the Fedora
> Documentation Project or not. The author has previously confirmed that
> he would be ok with others basing their work on his but it would
> courteous to reconfirm at this point.

As it happens, Miles Brennan wrote to me to say, more or less,
that he was happy with the Document Project licence.

I must admit I am slightly allergic to the endless discussion
of the myriad of open source licences,
which seems to me to cause much more trouble
than any good it does.
(I suspect that I follow in the footsteps of Linus Torvald in this.)

I don't usually agree with Karl Larsen (that is an under-statement)
but I agree with him that the Fedora Documentation Project
seems to be run in an excessively formalistic way,
with pointless hurdles erected in the way of those who want to help.
The idea of making life simple does not seem to rank high
in the order of priorities.

If the Project was a roaring success this might be understandable.
But as far as I can see the result of this formality
has been that the output of the project has been meagre, to put it mildly.
In fact there seems to be far more discussion _about_ the Project
than actual documentation produced by it.