Re: Core Docs

The core perl documentation is owned by several parties (which is to say, either the author(s) of the specific documentation and/or Larry Wall or some other legal person that has been assigned the copyright by its authors. See for instance perlreftut). Most of it is (probably) under the perl license (i.e. artistic/gpl) though some of the doc files have additional copyright/licensing comments and others do not specify any license in the resulting manpage. In your case, I would recommend you review each perldoc/manpage and its source file separately.

As far as I know, none of the core docs are under the GFDL.

As a side-note, opinion is divided on whether the GFDL is any good (compared to the GPL - Debian for instance considers the GFDL to be a non-free license)

update: GFDL describes the Gnu Free Documentation License and some of its criticisms.

update: s/weather/whether/ - thanks liverpole.

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

Comment on Re: Core Docs

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Re^2: Core Docs by bastard (Hermit) on Oct 10, 2007 at 01:55 UTC
I would have to concurr with GFDL as being a bad thing. I once was considering creating a phone based service to provide access to Wikipedia and as far as I could tell it wasn't practical. Sure you can reproduce the content, but you have to include the disclaimers and other superfluous information as required by the GFDL that in many cases doubled the call time. A few emails to the FSF and they admitted the GFDL didn't even permit audio reproduction and suggested I work with the copyright owner to arrange other terms. (So services for blind people are a no-go). (A) much better license(s) for content are the creative commons licenses. http://creativecommons.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons They actually offer freedom. P.S.- if you want to create a monopoly over a collection of content, the GFDL is the way to do it. Just add some ridiculously long text that has to accompany any use of the content and it becomes worthless to others. dratsab	[reply]

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Re^2: Core Docs
by bastard (Hermit) on Oct 10, 2007 at 01:55 UTC

I would have to concurr with GFDL as being a bad thing. I once was considering creating a phone based service to provide access to Wikipedia and as far as I could tell it wasn't practical.

Sure you can reproduce the content, but you have to include the disclaimers and other superfluous information as required by the GFDL that in many cases doubled the call time.

A few emails to the FSF and they admitted the GFDL didn't even permit audio reproduction and suggested I work with the copyright owner to arrange other terms. (So services for blind people are a no-go).

(A) much better license(s) for content are the creative commons licenses.
http://creativecommons.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons

They actually offer freedom.

P.S.- if you want to create a monopoly over a collection of content, the GFDL is the way to do it. Just add some ridiculously long text that has to accompany any use of the content and it becomes worthless to others.

dratsab

[reply]