Is Bazaar's document distributed under GPL?

[Ben Finney]

INADA Naoki <songofacandy at gmail.com> writes:

> Some restriction in GPL is too heavy for Documents and it is why GNU
> presents GFDL.

No, the GPL is fine for any software work, including documentation.
Which restrictions do you consider “too heavy”?

The FDL, on the other hand, has many restrictions that are “too heavy”
<URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License#Criticism>
including overly broad restrictions on file access control, restrictions
on printing that are burdensome for anything smaller than a full book,
and rather arbitrary restrictions on data formats.

Then of course there are the problems of unmodifiable sections that (if
those clauses are applied) make works clearly non-free, and the fact
that the FDL is always incompatible in both directions with the GPL.

As is probably clear by now, I strongly recommend against applying the
FDL to any work.

More broadly, I disagree that different license terms need to be devised
for different interpretations of digital information (“software”). It is
quite common for a given software work to simultaneously be a program, a
data file, a document, etc. depending on how it is interpreted. The same
freedoms and restrictions are deserved by the recipient regardless of
how the bits are interpreted once received.

> Must we treat Bazaar's document under GPL?

I hope so, since I have long been convinced that the best licensing
situation for a work is for the same license terms to apply to the whole
work. This allows the common act of treating different pieces of the
work in different ways at different points in time, and avoids the need
for drawing arbitrary lines on what the interpretation of a stream of
bytes will be at any given point in time.

I would also like to know the answer to the question you ask, that of
the license terms for the Bazaar documentation; I can't find it easily
at <URL:http://doc.bazaar-vcs.org/en/>. The documentation source tarball
<URL:http://doc.bazaar-vcs.org/bzr.1.18-docs.tar.gz> doesn't contain any
license grant within the tarball that I can find.

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Ben Finney