License problem in Ubuntu Desktop Guide (Re: Incorporating Gnome docs into ours)

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

On Aug 27, 2006, at 10:10 PM, Matthew East wrote:
> ...
> Ok, I've tried just directly incorporating the Gnome user-guide into 
> the desktop guide, and it works really well I think. Have a look at 
> the
> desktopguide now in our svn.
>
> What do people think?
> ...

This would have been the start of something really good, and I hate to 
be the one throwing the treacle, especially since I'm not a lawyer, but 
...

The About page for the Ubuntu Desktop Guide currently claims that "this 
document is made available under a dual license strategy that includes 
the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and the Creative Commons 
ShareAlike 2.0 License (CC-BY-SA) ... You are free to modify, extend, 
and improve the Ubuntu documentation source code under the terms of 
these licenses."

But that is not true. The contributors to Gnome's Desktop User Guide 
agreed only to "the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) 
... with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover 
Texts". You can't now claim that they also agreed to the CC-BY-SA. (Nor 
can you even claim that they agreed to having invariant sections and 
front-/back-cover texts added to their work, as allowed by the vanilla 
GFDL that Ubuntu uses.)

In the long term, this problem is one of those due to be solved by 
Project Mallard, with its separated topic-based pages (which could, I 
suppose, each be under a different license with no ill effects). In the 
meantime, I would be very surprised if it was legally possible to merge 
the documents like this.

Cheers
-- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/