Documentation license

Documentation
1

There is confusion here :

2

You’re right. We should unify this. Is it possible to publish documentation under LGPL? That would be the easiest… Everything is LGPL… Not sure it’s possible though. I don’t remember where this open publication license comes from, but I’d bet 99.99% of the people who contribute to the wiki consider it’s CC-licensed, so that would be a good solution too, simply say it’s CC and change the wiki license page.

3

Is it possible to publish documentation under LGPL?

Originally the GNU documentation itself was under GPL (https://www.gnu.org/doc/doc.en.html), later the GFDL was created for documentation. I don’t think it makes much sense to release documentation under LGPL because what is the “Lesser” good for in this case?
According to Wikipedia GFDL is not unproblematic so it’s probably best to go with CC.

4

When I packaged the wiki by way of the freecad-doc package, I had assumed the license was CC-BY-3.0:

https://salsa.debian.org/science-team/freecad-doc/blob/master/debian/copyright

I hadn’t noticed the license issues, but IMO we should just correct everything to use CC-BY-3.0.

5

Okay the license page is modified, I changed the open documentation license to CC. I also did a couple of other changes:

  • removed the old “not fully open-source” OCC block, since it only applied to pre-0.14, I think (I hope) we can safely assume nobody is using FreeCAD 0.13 anymore :slight_smile:
  • the statement from Jürgen is now at the bottom of the page, I think people will want to know first what the license is, then hear why it is so, not the contrary…
  • I rewrote most of the text inside the “Impact of the licenses” section to be a bit more friendly for non-programmers, specifically address addon authors, and address some things we keep hearing recently, such as “are the files I produce with open-source software also open-source?”, tell me what you think!