[Monotone-devel] Re: re-licensing the monotone manual

[Emile Snyder]

I am fine with anything I contributed to the manual being released under
the GPL, v2 or later (although I don't think I have anything
sufficiently substantive to matter).

-Emile Snyder

(And hi to all you monotone developers; long time no see.  Hope all is
well with everyone.)

On Sun, 2007-02-18 at 18:42 -0800, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> Currently, the main monotone manual, 'monotone.texi' in the source
> tree, is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL).
> Now, it turns out that this is a lousy license, that is probably not
> even DFSG-free[1].  It certainly has a whole host of obnoxious
> practical problems; in particular, it is never possible to move text
> from code into documentation, or vice-versa -- the GFDL and GPL are
> entirely incompatible licenses.  
> 
> So we want to change the license on monotone.texi to be GPL.  This is
> a boring and annoying change to make, which is why we've been letting
> it slide for months and months, but... it really should happen.  So.
> If you're getting this as a personal mail, it's because at some point
> you touched the monotone manual, and I ask you:
> 
>   PLEASE REPLY TO THIS EMAIL, CC'ING address@hidden, AND
>   SAY THAT YOU ARE FINE WITH YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS TO monotone.texi BEING
>   RELEASED UNDER THE GPL (v2 or later).
> 
> Probably not everyone on this list actually made significant enough
> changes to have a copyright interest, but hey, it's easier this way...
> 
> Cheers,
> -- Nathaniel
> 
> [1] The question of DFSG-freeness is actually sort of complicated --
> Debian as a whole does consider the GFDL to be DFSG-free (as long as
> you don't have any invariant section sections), but only because they
> had a whole general body vote on the matter, and that was the majority
> outcome.  OTOH, the denizens of debian-legal, who presumably are the
> subset of Debian developers who actually know what they're talking
> about, overwhelmingly disagree:
>   http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml#survey
> Personally, I find the arguments that GFDL is non-free to be the most
> compelling.
>