Re: Copyright/license of transition guide?

[Daniel Leidert <daniel.leidert.spam@gmx.net>]

Am Dienstag, den 25.08.2009, 18:19 +0200 schrieb Jirka Kosek:
> Daniel Leidert wrote:
> 
> > First, thanks for your answer. Unfortunately this license does not fit
> > the requirements of the Debian project - the Debian Free Software
> > Guidelines (DFSG) [1]. It wouldn't allow us or a user to modify the
> > source - not even to fix a typo or to create a translation.
> 
> If there is a typo, it should be reported upstream to fix primary
> document. If someone wants to create translation, he has to ask and he
> will of course be granted to create translation. But this way we will be
> aware of translation and we can link to it from original English version.

The same way you could argue, that patches must be sent upstream and
that noone has the right to distribute patched versions of a software.
Why do we have free software then? The above doesn't fit the
requirements ofg free software. Why do you prefer to put your software
under the BSD license? You have written some kind of document. Well,
maybe someone wants to write some other article on top of yours to
document some other part of DB5 or a variant of DB5 or some topic
related to DB5 or .... Further your chances to find a translator will
decrease by forcing people to have to ask for it. And I bet, translators
will contact you, even without forcing them to do so :)

If you know me you know, I prefer to work closely with upstream and I
send patches back to upstream.

> > [2] contains a list of acceptable licenses for the Debian project. I
> > don't know your discussion, so I cannot make a suggestion (why not an
> > BSD license or an MIT/X license?). Why do you want to forbid derivatives
> > works?
> 
> Well, it is document not a software for which I prefer BSD.

IMHO you cannot clearly distinguish between software and documentation.
Documentation might be added  to  a source file and vice-versa. JFTR:
The FreeBSD project put their documentation under a BSD-like license:

http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-doc-license.html

If you decide for e.g. the CC-BY-ND license, I have to remove the howto
from the Debian package and it won't be shipped to our users. Sorry, but
I'm not willing to put the DB5 schemas into our non-free section just
for this howto. However, I would much prefer to not have to do this.

Regards, Daniel