Re: doc license section

[Paul Jarc]

[IANAL.]

Pierre Bernatchez <address@hidden> wrote:
> GNU's role is to provide advice, guidelines and
> a rallying point, not dictating decisions.
> Leadership not autocracy, the decisions are for
> participants to arrive at by consensus.

AIUI, the FSF also takes on the responsibility of legally defending
the copyright and license of some free software.  For a given package
to benefit from this protection, its copyright must be assigned to the
FSF; the FSF is not able to defend it otherwise.  But since the FSF is
the copyright holder, they are entirely within their rights to decide
what license to use - since they are taking on the burden of defending
the license, it's reasonable that they should get to choose which
license to defend.

For your own code and documentation, if you don't want the FSF to
decide the license, don't assign copyright.  It's a tradeoff, and the
choice is yours to make.  For the code and documentation of Guile, the
contributors have already made their respective choices.

The same issues would arise if a single individual, instead of an
organization, were handling this legal work.  On these issues, you can
relate to the FSF just as you would relate to another individual.

> GFDL raises questions for which adequate answers
> have yet to be given.

I agree.

> The correct default, pending further debate should be
> the status quo, what our community has been doing all along,
> publishing both source and its documentation under the same
> license.

AIUI, Marius isn't legally entitled to decide the license anyway.  If
you want the license to change, you'll have to make this argument to
the FSF's legal decision-makers.

It may be that the FSF delegates this legal decision-making power to
each package maintainer and merely provides recommendations instead of
exercising its authority directly, but I'm unaware of it, and it would
surprise me.


paul