"Modified" FreeBSD Documentation License?

Murray Stokely murray at stokely.org
Sun Jul 27 19:35:40 UTC 2008


On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 6:50 PM, Lorenzo E. Danielsson
<danielsson.lorenzo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1. If I modify the license text to read for instance "Latex" instead of
> DocBook SGML, is it valid to still call the license FreeBSD
> Documentation License, or do I need to avoid that name?

I'm not a lawyer, but I think that will be fine.  CCing Nik Clayton
who setup a lot of our earlier infrastructure for stuff like this.

> 2. Regarding the ODF documents: is it valid to consider documents
> written in a tool like OpenOffice.org a "source" format?

Yea if one can edit that and produce output formats then it is a source format.

> 3. Suppose we go one step further and change the copyright notice to
> state the author's name instead of "FreeBSD Project" as well as "..
> PROVIDED BY THE FREEBSD DOCUMENTATION PROJECT" to .. PROVIDED BY
> <AUTHOR>", is it still valid to call the license "FreeBSD Documentation
> License"?

Where are you going to name the license this?  You might just say "All
of our work is licensed under a modified FreeBSD Documentation
License.  See the header to individual files for the license terms."

> I guess what I'm trying to find out is if the documentation license is
> "re-usable" in the same way that the BSD license is usable outside of
> the BSD Project itself. Does this make sense? I have zero legal
> background.

I would think that would be fine.

        - Murray



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