License information
Free software needs free documentation. This page provides information on the licenses used in documentation throughout GNOME.
CC-BY-SA 4.0
All new documentation produced by the documentation team is licensed under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-SA 4.0. This is a copyleft license, requiring all derivative works to be released under the same license.
To insert a licence into your user help, create a legal.xml file inside the C/ directory which contains the license terms and linking to it from each help page using <include href="legal.xml" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"/> inside the <info> element.
For help that contains no code, the legal.xml file should contain the following:
<license xmlns="http://projectmallard.org/1.0/"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">
<p>This work is licensed under a
<link href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International</link> license.</p>
</license>
Code exception
Thanks to Luis Villa and the Software Freedom Law Center, we have a standard license exception for developer documentation which allows unrestricted reuse of code samples. This exception can be used regardless of which license is being used. To use the exception, append the following to your licensing blurb:
- As a special exception, the copyright holders give you permission to copy, modify, and distribute the example code contained in this documentation under the terms of your choosing, without restriction.
For help that contains code, the legal.xml file should contain the following:
<license xmlns="http://projectmallard.org/1.0/"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">
<p>This work is licensed under a
<link href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International</link> license.</p>
<p>As a special exception, the copyright holders give you permission to copy,
modify, and distribute the example code contained in this documentation under
the terms of your choosing, without restriction.</p>
</license>
Other licences
The GNOME documentation team previously used CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported and United States licenses.
GNOME documentation previously used the GFDL, but was relicenced around GNOME 3.0 because:
- The GFDL requires the full licence text to be included in any extract from the document, which is difficult to comply with.
- The GFDL is designed for books and technical manuals, rather than dynamic, topic-based help as provided by Mallard.
- Sole use of CC-BY-SA (without dual licencing) allows content sharing with other sources such as Ubuntu help, Fedora help and Wikipedia, which GNOME collaborates with a lot. Using GFDL would only allow one-way transfer from GNOME help to others.
- CC-BY-SA allows for easy attribution, whereas GFDL requires much more verbose attribution.
