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

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.