Hi,

Just curious, what is FPC's documentation license? At moment it seems like it doesn't specify any all - which might not be a good idea. I looked in the fpcdocs repository and in all the generated PDF's.

Normally open source projects specify a GNU Free Documentation License v1.3 or something like the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (used by the likes of Wikipedia).

Regards,
- Graeme -

I fundamentally do not believe in licenses. Not even free ones.

Hence I specify none for the docs.

Michael.

Michael Van Canneyt

I fundamentally do not believe in licenses. Not even free ones. Hence I specify none for the docs.

Ehh, I like this one…when considering to write something, it’s cumbersome that one has to think about licenses, law etc…

However, it’s nice one is not alone. ;)

Sincerely,
Gour

Michael Van Canneyt wrote

I fundamentally do not believe in licenses. Not even free ones. Hence I specify none for the docs.

The problem with this is that if you don't specify a license, the default in copyright law is that no one is allowed to do anything with your work without explicit permission from you (other than reading the HTML version on the web site, as publishing it like that is considered an implicit permission to read it).

You can always use a public domain or CC0 license if you don't want to impose any conditions on anyone.

Jonas

If you believe in copyright law, yes. I don't believe in that either.

Patents, copyright, trademarks: a lot of male cow droppings.

You can always use a public domain or CC0 license if you don't want to impose any conditions on anyone.

No, it means that you play the game by the rules that are set by people that believe in licenses.

I don't want to play this anyway: the whole discussion is moot. The latex files do contain some kind of copyright notice. Long time ago, someone once suckered me into it. I wasn't as firm in my convictions back then :)

Jonas Maebe wrote

The problem with this is that if you don't specify a license, the default in copyright law is that no one is allowed to do anything with your work without explicit permission from you

Correct, and which actually applies a lot of restriction.

I've been reading up on the GFDL and Creative Commons licenses. The GFDL requires that you include a full copy of that license in any text or print, which I don't like. The Creative Commons seems quite nice, as you can mix and match the parts you want. Their website, videos etc also makes it very clear (I thought) in what each "part" means.

eg:
Here is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ It mixes in 3 parts: Attribution, NonCommercial & ShareAlike.

Incidently, this is a well used Creative Commons license for open-source books.

Regards,
- Graeme -

Michael Van Canneyt wrote

If you believe in copyright law, yes. I don't believe in that either.

As the saying goes: reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away...

PS. And anyway: the whole discussion is moot. The latex files do contain some kind of copyright notice.

It's LGPL, which is not really adapted to text, although I guess it will do.

Jonas

Jonas Maebe

As the saying goes: reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away...

(un)Fortunately. ;)

Sincerely,
Gour

Some sort of statement of ownership or permissive licence is desirable, in order to stop somebody appropriating documents etc., treating them as their own property, and slapping on strict redistribution notices to the detriment of the community.

As a particular example, the firmware of the classic HP RPN calculators doesn't embed a copyright message, with the result that it appears that it is now free for distribution as a part of e.g.
http://nonpareil.brouhaha.com/ which is generally accepted by everybody as good clean fun. However somebody else has started making changes to the firmware and now sells calculators in potential competition with HP http://www.swissmicros.com/ which makes a lot of people unhappy.

If the project doesn't put a clear statement of ownership on everything, then there is a risk that somebody will put their own notice on things and claim that their files are the original and anything published by FPC/Lazarus is an unauthorised copy. Sorting things out would probably be messy and expensive.

He could put the text, "This document is in the Public Domain" and wouldn't need anything else.

g.