[RP] Re: Licensing terms for ratpoison info page

[Björn Lindström]

This discussion really has to do with several different issues. I'll try
to sum up all of them here. They are:

Moving stuff to/from the docs to/from the wiki,
FDL,
Dual licensing,

and

Changing the license of the wiki.


==Moving stuff to/from the docs to/from the wiki==

I'm not sure it's really necessary that this is necessary.

First, as Shawn said, it's not really that hard to write your own
descriptions for the wiki.

Second, it might even be advantageous. If the docs and wiki overlap,
there are two sources of information, and if one of them doesn't make
sense to some user, chances are the other one will.

In short, I thing the docs should be kept as a short and concise
documentation of features, while the wiki can be used to explore the
dusty corners that the docs doesn't go into, and stuff that doesn't have
with ratpoison/StumpWM to do in a strict sense, but still are useful to
collect in one place. That wasn't so short after all.


==FDL==

As a consequence of this, I don't really see the wiki being licensed
under the FDL as a great problem. Let's go on to dual licensing.


==Dual licensing==

Whether we should dual license the wiki or not has to do with two
things:

===How to handle the case where it would be useful to redistribute code
snippets from the wiki in a GPL:ed work===

I'd say this is handled well enough by FDL:s suggestion to distribute
significant portions of code separately, under the GPL.

Anyway, I don't think this is a problem likely to occur so often that we
can't handle it on a case-to-case basis.


===Moving stuff to/from the docs to/from the wiki again==

Dual licensing the wiki would help with copying stuff from the wiki to
the docs. I don't think a need for that is likely to appear. The
documentation is meant to be a concise description of the program and
not much else. Thus, it will need to be written in a different, much
more linear, fashion, than the wiki.

Also, undocumented features are unlikely to be described on the wiki
before they appear in the docs, for obvious reasons.

To do the opposite, the docs would have to be dual licensed in
the same way. Since the documentation authors are quite easy to reach
via the Internet, I'd say it would be simpler to just handle that by
having them copy stuff from the documentation to the wiki, in case it's
really desirable. As I've already said, I'm not sure it ever is.


==Changing the license of the wiki==

If people still want to do it, I'll say this:

a) it should affect both the ratpoison and StumpWM wikis equally, to
eliminate confustion. (Maybe this goes without saying.)

b) I believe it should happen like this:

* We put together a new license, after much discussion and arguing on
  the wiki.

* We put up a notice on the front pages on both wikis, notifying the
  change. Contemporaneously, we mail as many of the contributors as we
  can find E-mail addresses for. The mailing list subscriber list should
  help with that.

* If no complaints has arrived at the announced date, we change the
  license notices.

That's probably as correct a way to do it as we can reasonably be
expected to use.


If you didn't bear reading all that, here's the short version:

a) I don't think we should change the license, for good reasons.
b) If you still want to we can.


PS. If it becomes clear that a majority of the contributors want to
change the licensing, I don't mind the work with changing it, even
though I'm opposed to changing it, at this point. I was the one picking
the FDL as a license without consulting anyone, after all.

-- 
Björn Lindström <address@hidden>
http://bkhl.elektrubadur.se/