[Qgis-psc] License QGIS documentation

[Otto Dassau]

Hi, 

I talked to Bernhard Reiter (FSF Europe) about licensing the QGIS documentation.
Here is what he said (translated from german):

################################

1) GNU FDL (Free Document License)

GNU FDL seems to be a good choice for separate, independent documentation, but
not for software source code. This means, if we add parts of the source code to
the qgis documentation, then we can get in trouble when people want to quote
parts of the documentation together with source code extracts.

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/fdl.html

=> Since we probably aim to have one license for all documentation (incl.
Coding Guide), FDL seems to be not the best choice. 

2) CC-BY and CC-BY-SA Licences v2.0 seem to be incompatible with GNU FDL _and_
GNU GPL. 

see Licenses For Documentation:
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#DocumentationLicenses

=> A License incompatible to the GNU GPL is not a choice for us.

3) Also CC-BY-SA License v3.0 does not seem to be compatible with the GNU FDL.

It seems that at the moment "an article about Rio de Janeiro on Wikipedia 
(which is currently licensed under the FDL) cannot be mixed with an article
about Rio on Wikitravel (which is currently licensed under the CC BY-SA 1.0)"

As far as I (Otto) understand they want to change that in the future.

see:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Version_3#BY-SA_.E2.80.94_Compatibility_Structure_Introduced

=> I am not absolutely sure, but there seems to be problem, too.

Finally Bernhard has 3 suggestions: 

a) GNU GPL: 

Advantage: it is compatible with GNU GPL and the source code and well
understood.  
Disadvantage: It does not really fit for manuals and we should check, if that is
a problem for QGIS documentation.

b) Double licensing: GNU FDL 1.3 and CC-BY-SA 3.0

Advantage: It is compatible to both license systems
Disadvantage: Improvements of the documentation are more difficult and as
described above there is the problem to mix text and source code (FDL).

c) We can use a weaker license, which is still compatible to GNU FDL, GPL and
CC-BY and CC_BY-SA. There is a list here:

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#OtherLicenses

An example is The FreeBSD Documentation License:
http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-doc-license.html

In this case, maybe also CC-BY could work, but the disadvantage is the weak
protection.

###############

I haven't had much time to read all this, but I would like to find and present a
suitable license for the QGIS documentation soon. If you hava any ideas or
suggestions, please write.

My first impression is a) or c), but we will see...

 regards,
  Otto



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