FDL additional constraints

[Sam Liddicott]

As this is a hot topic I need to state that I'm asking a straight honest
question and hoping to avoid lengthy discussion.

If a document contains this license statement, is it compliant with the
GPL3? In both directions?

    Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
    document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License,
    Version 1.3 <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html> or any later
    version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
    Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.


And, technically, is such a document licensed under the FDL or have we
just made a new license which is the FDL + 3 constraints?

The question arises with respect to a literate programming tool I have
written, called newfangle. I'm trying to find out if the "Book of the
Code" may be FDL licensed with such a statement.

(Out of respect for Savannah requirements, I'm FDL licensing all the
general documentation and meta-documentation).

Sam
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[Rob Myers]

On Mon, 22 Feb 2010 11:21:08 -0000, "Sam Liddicott" <sam@...>
wrote:
> As this is a hot topic I need to state that I'm asking a straight honest

> question and hoping to avoid lengthy discussion.
>
> If a document contains this license statement, is it compliant with the
> GPL3?
>
> In both directions?

If by "compliant" you mean "compatible" then no, the GPL and FDL are
incompatible for the FSF's definition of compatible.

>
>     Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
>     document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License,
>     Version 1.3 <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html> or any later
>     version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
>     Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
>
>
> And, technically, is such a document licensed under the FDL or have we
> just made a new license which is the FDL + 3 constraints?

You cannot add the requirement that downstream users not add invariant
sections. The text as above simply declares how the FDL is being used on
the document it is applied to.

> The question arises with respect to a literate programming tool I have
> written, called newfangle. I'm trying to find out if the "Book of the
> Code" may be FDL licensed with such a statement.

As the copyright holder, you can licence the book however you like.
Something like:

"This book is FDL licenced. Additionally, all code is also licenced GPL 3
or later (at your option)."

expanded to the full legalese should do it.

But possibly a better solution is to dual-licence the literate sources as
FDL/GPL3+ . Then the book can be FDL and the extracted source code GPL.
This will have the practical effect of allowing people to read the book
under the FDL, the extracted source under the GPL, and modify the literate
sources under both.

I would recommend asking licensing@... about this approach to make
sure it's sound.

I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.

- Rob.


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