Copyright of the desktop configuration specification (careful, here be dragons)

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 19:41 +0200, Lauri Watts wrote:
> On Tuesday 04 October 2005 19.03, C. Gatzemeier wrote:

> 
> If you want to use the GFDL (and it's a good license, it takes care of the 
> special needs of writers quite nicely) then you might simply use a version of 
> the license notice that is unequivocal:
> 
> "Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under 
> the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later 
> version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant 
> Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of 
> the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation 
> License".
> 
> This is the version we have been happily using for KDE docs for 5 odd years 
> now, and other than the occasional debian user (note, never developer, 
> lawyer, or other informed party) who writes to me in a snit, is easily 
> mollified by the explanation that the objectionable bits are outlawed from 
> inclusion by the very license notice in use.  

Right. This is exactly what I was thinking about as a temporary
solution. 

So .. until there's a very very good copyright template or document
specifically meant for specifications written with a free software
philosophy in mind, I'm going to use the GNU Free Documentation License
with all the objectionable bits outlawed from inclusion. I'm probably
simply going to copy the COPYING file of one of the KDE documentation
projects :-p. If Debian already accepted that, there's no need to try
reinventing the wheel.

Later I might decide to change the copyright of later versions of the
document to a more suitable copyright. So if you are planning to
contribute to the document, keep in mind that some day I'll ask you
whether or not it's okay for you to release your contributions under the
terms of that new (more suitable) copyright.

I already decided that all the samples and the DTD schemas are in the
public domain and everybody and every entity in this universe is hereby
allowed to use the samples and schemas for any purpose imaginable.
Including rebranding, cooking meals, burning houses or crashing cars. If
you can use the samples for that, that's so cool! Go ahead. (But do note
that I'm not accountable for your actions).

My plans for an implementation (I'm already working on something,
indeed) are to release the implementation as GPL. But everybody is, of
course, allowed to do an reference implementation. If you want your
implementation to be referenced in the document ... contact me and/or
send me a diff that does this.



-- 
Philip Van Hoof, software developer at x-tend
home: me at pvanhoof dot be
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
work: vanhoof at x-tend dot be
http://www.pvanhoof.be - http://www.x-tend.be