Re: [gentoo-doc] Supporting CC-BY-SA 3.0 and later versions

[Joshua Saddler]

On Sun, 27 Nov 2011 17:41:37 +0000
Sven Vermeulen <swift@g.o> wrote:

> Hi
> guys,
> With http://wiki.gentoo.org having their documents as CC-BY-SA 3.0,
> I thought it might be a good idea to work this out for our
> documents as well. That would allow us to "tech-write" stuff that
> is on the wiki properly, but also use the newer (and recommended)
> version.
> Of course, that won't be done by just making <license /> refer to
> the 3.0 as that will break our documents (legally, that is).
> Instead, I was considering to add @version support to the license
> entity (in dtd and xsl), update the supporting documents (xml-guide
> and the like) so that this can be done less
> intrusively.
> In other words, support "<license version='3.0' />" for documents
> that need to be CC-BY-SA 3.0, or for new
> documents.
> What's your take on
> this?

i should weigh in on this:

sure, go ahead and add the version attribute. only issue i can see is
that we'll have a ton of different licenses in play over time, which
will lead to the same problem we have now between the wiki and /doc/,
except that the potential conflicts will all be in /doc/, between our
own documents.

as long as future docs are copyrighted to the gentoo foundation or
something, relicensing to use the latest version of CC shouldn't be
much of a problem. though i really hate the idea of blanket
relicensing in general, having seen all the issues that's caused for
gentoo-wiki.com over the years.

we might want to think about something like the "or later" clause in
recent GPL versions, just to be able to keep up with the changes in
Creative Commons. although "or later" doesn't cover switching to a
completely different license, should that become necessary.