choice of documentation license

[Tshepang Lekhonkhobe]

Why choose a non-commercial license[1]? This has the disadvantage of
disallowing, for example, Debian to distribute it[2], which would be
nice.

[1]: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
[2]: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=640780.

[Chris McDonough]

At this point I'd like to change the docs license to a free license,
TBH. I had a delusion at some point that we'd need to protect it from
publishing shops that just scrape existing free docs and sell books
based on those docs without contributing anything back to the community,
which would compete with book sales from folks who do, but I think the
point is probably moot. It would be easiest to give the docs the same
license as the code, I guess, although I'd be interested in hearing
other opinions.

[Steve Piercy]

On 3/22/13 at 4:32 PM, chr...@plope.com (Chris McDonough) pronounced:

So out of all these licenses:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

...are you suggesting this one would be the best fit?
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

--steve

--steve

[Tshepang Lekhonkhobe]

Am glad you feel like this.

On the not-giving-back point, it still benefits Pyramid usage (if the
'bad guy' succeeds at all), and that would make that 'bad guy' more
beneficial to Pyramid (by way of spreading info) way more than some
other guy who greatly benefits from Pyramid but does not give anything
back at all (the majority of users, and an understandable situation).

[Tshepang Lekhonkhobe]

I myself don't care which, though I like the simplicity of using the
same license as that of Pyramid software (but am not familiar enough
with these licensing things to be sure if that's the best thing). I
only care to a point where the license is free enough to be
OSI-compliant, so the documentation can be included in libre systems
like Debian.

[Jonathan Vanasco]

I'd suggest these 2 strategies:

1. Dual-License the Docs as a choice between Current or the Perl
Artistic license. The Artistic license is OSI & Debian approved, but
neuters most commercial activities ( docs can be on retail CDs , but
books would fall under a "reasonable copying fee" ).

2. split the documentation into two distributions :
* API Documentation - Same license as Pyramid itself
* Narrative documentation - keep it as-is , possibly dual-licence as
above. but i'd rather see it as-is for reasons below...

Debian's take on "Free" is unique. With good rationale, they consider
even things like the GNU Free Documentation License to be non-free.
If the narrative docs are split off, they can still be in a non-free
repo. Realistically, the overwhelming majority of people using the
docs are going to be interfacing with them online , or won't have an
issue downloading a new archive.

The narrative docs are great, and it would be sad to see someone
exploit them. do people buy tech books anymore? i'm worried more
about the companies that take free content, run SEO and SEM campaigns
against them, and make money off arbitrage. i'd like to know that
when people search for something on Pyramid, they end up at the
official docs -- not some clone that is exploiting it.

[Tshepang Lekhonkhobe]

This all looks complicated and unnecessary. Sure you got worries, but
are there good examples of such abuses taking place? Looking at
CPython documentation as an example, they do share same license as the
respective software they document... not much worry is waster on
dual-licensing and other ugly things. Same applies to Django
documentation (as well as the majority of FLOSS projects).

AFAIK, the only people doing the dual-licensing and non-libre docs are
those hoping on making money from said documentation/software. That's
not the case for Pyramid.