[publican-list] licensing defaults

[Jeffrey Fearn]

Karsten Wade wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 12:27:47PM -0700, Karsten Wade wrote:
>> Why is the default license in Publican the GFDL?
 >>
>> Why are Publican documents under the GFDL?
>>
>> I thought we cleaned up use of this legacy license a while ago.
 >>
>> Default Publican license should be CC BY SA 3.0 Unported.  Should I
>> just file a bug or ...?
> 
> Sorry for the abruptness of this email.  I was blasting through using
> Publican for a build, realized it put the content under a different
> license than I expected, and am busy creating a new brand[1] so I can
> get the intended license.  I'd like to take the moment I should have
> before and explain myself.
> 
> I recognize that Publican is a stand-alone upstream project and its
> developers have the right to choose whatever FLOSS license they
> prefer.  I don't mean to be calling that in to question.
> 
> First, I'm merely curious why the useage of the GFDL?  Does it have
> advantages over the CC BY SA?  (This is based on the well considered
> and supported opinion that the CC BY SA _does_ have advantages over
> the GFDL.)

The reason GFDL was chosen was because CC-BY-SA is not GPL compatible 
and it seemed odd to have software documentation that is incompatibly 
licensed with the software it comes with.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ccbysa

> Second, can we consider changing the default license that Publican
> puts on books using the default brand to the CC BY SA 3.0 Unported?

This would require relicensing the Users Guide and making it 
incompatibly licensed with the software, I guess it's possible, but it 
does seem odd to me.

You can currently set the license being used in the publican.cfg file, 
but we only ship the GFDL XML in the default brand, we could look at 
shipping multiple legal notices and making license a parameter for 
create, so you can easily pick or change the license.

> I'd be happy to rehash why Red Hat, the Fedora Project, and JBoss
> (aiui) have embraced the CC BY SA over other free content licenses,
> but I presume the Publican team knows all that.  (For example, I can't
> remix any of the Publican documentation in to Fedora documentation or
> use it in a new [[Publican (publishing toolchain)]] page on
> Wikipedia.)

Cheers, Jeff.

-- 
Jeff Fearn <jfearn at redhat.com>
Software Engineer
Engineering Operations
Red Hat, Inc
Freedom ... courage ... Commitment ... ACCOUNTABILITY