Appendix A. Rationale on Licensing
Trying to wade through licenses and the nuances in their meaning
is a royal pain. I wanted to allow redistribution of my
tutorial, keep derivative works under the same license, and
possibly permit an exclusive book printing so that the Gnome
Foundation could benefit from the proceeds. The Open
Publication License seemed like a good fit.
There were and are some issues, however:
-
This tutorial probably will not become large enough for
the Gnome Foundation to care about printing (I am just
keeping it in mind in a just-in-case scenario). Yet
someone else may want to do so, and it might be the best
thing for Gnome to allow them to.
-
The example code should probably be available under an
alternative license, though I'm not sure which one(s).
Something that makes this choice more difficult are two
somewhat opposing goals:
-
the "exclude book printing for commercial purposes"
clause and
-
the fact that I would like to encourage both those
developing open source and proprietary software to
use my examples.
-
I believe a lot of Gnome documentation is available under
the GFDL and perhaps other licenses. I really did not
want to use the GFDL, because my understanding is that
there are multiple issues with it. However, the GFDL and
OPL are incompatible with each other which would make
mix-and-matching of this tutorial and other Gnome
documentation impossible for others.
-
There may be other issues that I haven't thought of.
Since I basically want this tutorial to help Gnome as much as
possible, I decided to solve all these issues by allowing the
Board of Directors of the Gnome Foundation to redistribute the
tutorial (or parts thereof) under the terms of their choosing.
This basically means that I don't have to worry about stupid
licensing issues anymore, but problems can still be solved by
those in the position to know what the appropriate solution is.