Re: Commentary on the OPL

[Jonathan Larmour <jifl@eCosCentric.com>]

Andrew Lunn wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 16, 2005 at 01:40:31PM +0100, Jonathan Larmour wrote:
> 
>>We use the Open Publications Licence for our docs as you know. I've 
>>stumbled across this interesting commentary on it. It's quite interesting, 
>>to me at least :)...
> 
> 
> Was there some requirement for FSF that we change license?

Not yet. But they may either try to insist, or at least argue strongly 
that we use the FDL. If the latter then we'd have to have a strong belief 
that we're using the most appropriate licence. That commentary undermines 
some of that belief, to me at least.

Not that the FDL seems very good either. I have concerns, shared by others 
on the net, about how "Free" the FDL is. For example, how Free is it in 
section 4 <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html>. There's a whole load of 
things that restrict freedom there, and a "modification" need only be trivial.

It's very different to the GPL in principle. The GPL is all about the 
freedom to modify. The FDL is all about restrictions on that.

Jifl
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