Re: A licence for an ‘awesome list’ (was: Starting a GNU Guile awesome list)

[Vladimir Zhbanov]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 10:47:21PM +0200, Zelphir Kaltstahl wrote:
> Hi Dmitry!
> 
> On 16.07.20 11:18, Dmitry Alexandrov wrote:
> > Zelphir Kaltstahl <zelphirkaltstahl@posteo.de> wrote:
> >> On 15.07.20 08:36, Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
> >>> Zelphir Kaltstahl <zelphirkaltstahl@posteo.de> writes:
> >>>>> First at foremost, the list _itself_ has to be licensed as a free 
> >>>>> documentation.  FWIW, most of ‘awesome lists’ are under CC0.
> >>>> While the list is not CC0, I meant to put it under "GNU Free 
> >>>> Documentation License v1.3", which I think should be appropriate (Is it 
> >>>> not?) and free as in freedom. Good that you hint at the license, because 
> >>>> I thought it had a license already.
> >>> GFDL isn’t considered as free by the debian standards, because it can 
> >>> have invariant sections...

It is, if you explicitly prohibit invariant section, as in *Guile
Reference Manual*:

<quote>
   Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; *with no
Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts*.  A
copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free
Documentation License.”
</quote>

So, if you ensure this "no Invariant Sections" stanza is in place,
anything is free and OK for Debian.

...

> What is the impact or are the consequences of incompatibility with GPL,
> with regard to the list of links?

...

> I guess what I would like most would be CC0 with copyleft or GFDL
> without any problems from invariant sections or problems stemming from
> incompatibility with GNU GPL.
> 
> On the same page it also says:
> 
> /"For this reason, we encourage documentation authors to license their
> works (or dual-license, together with the GFDL) under the same terms as
> the software they refer to, or any of the traditional free software
> licenses like the GPL or the BSD license."/
> 
> But I thought GPL is only meant to be used for software? Think I read
> that many times in the past, that you should not use GPL for things
> other than software.
> 
> Or is it simply GPL that fit the bill of what I am looking for?

I suspect it is all about including chunks of your GPL'd code as
examples into your other licenced docs. And vice versa, e.g. if
you generate some parts of your docs from code comments.  If the
licence of the docs is GPL-compatible, then no issues at all.

-- 
  Vladimir

(λ)επτόν EDA — https://github.com/lepton-eda