GNU Free Documentation License 1.1 Out

Big Gaute writes "The final version of the GNU FDL (1.1) is now out. It contains a number of changes from version 1.0; for instance there is now a mechanism to make sure that the good name of an author is not used to endorse modified versions unless they so wish. " This comes shortly on the heels of the GNU FDL 1.0.

Comments

Re:Interesting

[Croaker]

Well, speaking as an author, the primary thing you want to avoid is the very real threat that some bozo will attempt to "improve" your writing, and totally screw it up. This can be something as simple as using poor grammar and bad spelling, or something as nasty as being factually wrong on something Really Important.

I had experience with this a long, long time ago. I published a manual for a piece of software. I didn't put any form of copyright on it (hey, I was innocent back then :). Some people took the document and modified it to fit their own hacked versions of the software (which was good, although I was a bit peeved that they didn't talk to me/send me the revisions). However, from then on, I got hassled by people about this or that being wrong in the manual, or got questions about how to use this or that local feature. None of which I could do anything about, since I didn't know about the revisions, and had no way of contacting whoever did.

Now that's I'm a professional writer, I'd be very reluctant to put anything out there that I'd allow to be modified without a license like this. The last thing I need is for a potential employer to go take a look at an altered version of the document, notice the crap that someone dumped into it, and attribute it to me.

Even then, I'd still be a bit leery of letting others hack my documents. I suppose that people
who release code under the GPL might feel the same thing, though. They're letting "their baby" go out into the world to back used and abused by others. I haven't really seen people losing control of their creations, though, so probably my fears are overstated. I've been thinking of releasing some documents of mine someday. Perhaps I will use the Gnu license to do that. If nothing else, it saves me from having to spell out what you can and can't do with the document myself.

Interesting

[hattig]

Authors must have been a bit worried that their name could have been used on a document that had been modified with hundreds of swear words 'livening' up the text. :-)

Although I rather like the idea of documentation saying "Click on the f-ing icon in the top left corner and then set the damned slider to whatever you f-ing like". "To f-ing shutdown the f-ing computer, f-ing click on the f-ing arse-named Start button". Would make man pages a lot more interesting as well.

Paper different than software

[ucblockhead]

I've got two comments about this.

First, I'm wondering if this is really needed. There are certainly cases of authors putting copyrighted material out there electronically, free for the copying. I know O'Reilly did this with on of their books. Bruce Sterling also did this with The Hacker Crackdown.

The reason this concerns me is that if I were an author, I'd want to get a royalty for any copy of the work that gets sold for cash. It doesn't seem right that a publishing company could publish the book and pay nothing. (see below.) And given the two examples above, I don't think that selling a book to a publisher and getting royalies precludes free electronic distribution.

In other words, it seems to me to make sense to have a license that allowed free electronic distribution, but that required print distributors to come to an agreement with the authors regarding payment. (Obviously complicated if it has passed through many hands.)

My second comment is that I suspect that the motivation to "FDL" a document won't be nearly as strong as the motivation to "GPL" a piece of software. One of the reasons I think that the GPL works is that most GPL'd software was written for the authors. They write something they need, perhaps throwing in things for people to ask as a favor. Regardless, they end up with something they can use themselves. In other words, their work has value to them after they've completed it. Documentation, on the other hand, is pretty much useless to the author (in most cases) after its completion. Presumably the author knows everything in the document and thus no longer needs the document.

And that's the thing. The motivation to write an FDL'd document may be altruism, or the desire for community approval, but it won't be self-interest. On the other hand, the motivation to write a GPL'd piece of software certainly can be self-interest. I write a program because I want the program, first and foremost.

That's not to say that I'm opposed to other people using the FDL. If people want to, more power to them. But if I were going to write technical docs (which I have thought about doing) I'd want to retain copyright. I'd probably allow free unmodified distribution, but I'd want to have the ability to sell the work to a publisher as well. It doesn't seem that the FDL allows this, unless the publisher is real stupid.