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.
--
Eternity is very long, especially towards the end.
-- Woody Allen