When free isn’t good enough: pushing free software authors away
Quite recently there has been a policy change in the free software host Savannah. Now it is no longer good enough to license documentation under the GNU General public license anymore. You either license it under the GNU free documentation license or a compatible license or take your code somewhere else! They do allow dual-licensing, but that IMHO isn’t good enough.
Having two different licenses complicates matters for users (COPYING_GPL, COPYING_FDL?) where complication is not really needed. According to the debian free software guidelines/social contract the FDL isn’t even allowed into Debian main, see http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement for a draft of Debian’s statement to this or http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq#GFDL for the FAQ covering this topic.
What this can do in my opinion is push people towards SourceForge.net. Which means that they (the FSF) are essentially pushing people away from free software (Savane) towards non-free software (SourceForge). This is imho a classic example of humans thinking they have more power than they have, or possibly feeling more of an urge to control. It is sad.
When I first said I wanted to blog about this the response I got was that I better not or I will be shut out of the savannah IRC channel or they will close it down completely. Threats does NOT work! However, now you can read it on their website too, so it really is no secret.
Now this is not the only place I disagree with the GNU-project. I for instance hate info-manuals, so my projects could not have become parts of the GNU project anyway, so let me license my documentation under my chosen free software license (GPL), thank you very much.
I, for one, will register my new projects at Gna! in the future (they have subversion too, so it might have an advantage other than licenses too). Gna! is a free alternative to Savannah.
February 16th, 2006 at 00:16
Hey,
I think you missed something here. Sylvain wrote:
“Existing manuals of existing non-GNU packages which are currently licensed under GPL-2-or-later can remain on Savannah with their current licenses”[1]
So it is only valid for NEW {non,}GNU project.
Furthermore Sylvain wrote:
“This policy applies to manuals written in Texinfo, and documentation which ought to be improved into such manuals.”[1]
So I guess your “little” documentation doesn’t apply to the ‘policy change’.
Beside that, Debian didn’t post ever a valid resource explaining why the GNU FDL isn’t good for them. The resources you pointed out are only from other users… and who cares about Debian? ;-)
[1] https://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=4303
March 17th, 2006 at 23:38
Did you read the statements of the Debian project because of the GNU FDL and the voting?
Debian accepted the GNU FDL as a free documentation license if your documentation doesn’t contain any invariant sections.
So ‘Free is good enough’ for the Debian project, too.
:-)
April 23rd, 2006 at 22:18
[...] Then one day I thought about this and well, using a proprietary website to produce and manage a free software project makes…well…no sense. So then I started looking at the alternatives. I landed on Savannah. My first Savannah project was GoldenPod. Followed by the (mostly dead) GoldenBackup (no link due to no website nor release, it does have a CVS though). Then followed by the common configuration parser. Then I had my disagreements with Savannah (as some of you might remember). [...]