I have appended the relevant conclusion Ian Lynagh wrote:
On Sun, Jan 08, 2006 at 09:31:16PM -0500, John Peterson wrote:
I believe the scenario that the FDL addresses is that someone (probably Paul Hudak!) "borrows" massive amounts of stuff from the wiki, adds his own good stuff, and then publishes a nice book or something without having to share his additional contribution. Some people would like to be sure that their contributions can't be exploited in this manner.
Why not use the GPL, then?
FWIW, the GFDL is considered non-free by Debian[1], so that would mean any documentation or anything derived from the wiki couldn't be packaged for Debian.
Apart from the issue of code itself on the wiki, that other people have already mentioned, presumably you'd also have licence fun if you try to take surrounding explanatory text to use as haddock docs etc.
Thanks Ian
[1] http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml http://home.twcny.rr.com/nerode/neroden/fdl.html
============== Conclusion It is not possible to borrow text from a GFDL'd manual and incorporate it in any free software program whatsoever. This is not a mere license incompatibility. It's not just that the GFDL is incompatible with this or that free software license: it's that it is fundamentally incompatible with any free software license whatsoever. So if you write a new program, and you have no commitments at all about what license you want to use, saving only that it be a free license, you cannot include GFDL'd text. The GNU FDL, as it stands today, does not meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines. There are significant problems with the license, as detailed above; and, as such, we cannot accept works licensed unde the GNU FDL into our distribution. ============== Thus defaulting the FDL for all wiki content, including code, is a very bad idea. -- Chris