[postgis-devel] Vote On Documentation License

[Chris Hodgson]

Regina brought up the issue of the documentation license earlier on both 
the -devel and -users lists. There was very little discussion on the 
issue at hand, other than the users list breaking out into a general 
licensing discussion relating more to postgis as a whole than 
specifically to the documentation. Given that there were no real 
naysayers (certainly none that I know of contributing to the 
documentation)....

I call the PSC to vote on designating the license for the PostGIS 
documentation to be the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I believe this license is just slightly more liberal than the GPL in 
that it doesn't not restrict people from selling the work or its 
derivatives, but it also adds the restriction that any derivatives must 
include attribution, which I think we intend to be attributed to "The 
PostGIS Project and its Contributors" or something similar. This is also 
the license which wikipedia content is under, and is very similar to 
both the FreeBSD Documentation License and the GNU Free Documentation 
License.

Given the nature of this decision I'd like to see a unanimous +1 from 
all PSC members, and also anyone who has contributed significantly to 
the documentation and is unhappy with the license should let us know. 
Any -1's please put forward your alternative license suggestion and your 
reasoning.

Once we agree on this, I suggest that Regina go forward with adding a 
copy of the license to the documentation and also adding the appropriate 
references to the license into the documentation (both source code and 
the final produced HTML/PDF outputs).

I'll start with my +1.

Cheers,
Chris