Add GNU Free Documentation License v1.3

[Tyler887]

[DWesl]

Projects that appear to use the GNU Free Documentation License for their documentation:

• gzip manual
• GNU tar manual
• Emacs manual
• GNU readline manual
• GNU coreutils manual
• GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) manual
• GNU bash manual

Basically I went through the list on the GNU website looking for packages I recognized and that others would likely recognize, then checked the documentation for mention of a license: some packages don't mention any license where I could find it quickly (nano, R), others use a different license (the Octave manual seems to use a simplified variant of CC-BY-SA).

I'm not sure what the policy is for what projects to include and which are redundant. If you want a longer list, GNU bison, autotools, make, guile, grep, awk, and sed probably also use GFDL for their manuals and have decent name recognition.

[mlinksva]

Thanks @DWesl; those would be great examples but probably the licenses we could point to (see other licenses for example) have Texinfo markup (example) which we currently can't deal with/will cause the tests to fail.

Are there any projects that use a verbatim without markup copy of FDL-1.3?

[DWesl]

Ah, that's where the delay's coming from. If texinfo's similar to LaTeX, it might be possible to just strip out the commands (s/@[a-zA-Z]+ *(\{.*?\}|\w+)?/\1/g should get close, I think). If that doesn't really work with the current test workflow (I don't understand ruby well enough to tell), then there's:

• Qt
  • qtbase: https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtbase.git/tree/LICENSES/GFDL-1.3-no-invariants-only.txt
  • pyside2: https://code.qt.io/cgit/pyside/pyside-setup.git/tree/LICENSES/GFDL-1.3-no-invariants-only.txt
  • qt-components (last updated a decade ago): https://gitorious.org/qt-components/qt-components?p=qt-components:qt-components.git;a=blob;f=LICENSE.FDL;h=938bb8da9e07e20ebf320ed6f7e703a295fe3d62;hb=HEAD
  • A few dozen personal Qt forks
• QGIS Documentation (Gentle GIS Introduction): https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Documentation/blob/master/docs/gentle_gis_introduction/gnu_free_documentation_license.rst (markup to make headers bold, maybe block-format the copyright notice under "how to use", and allow linking)
• GNU Scientific Library: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gsl.git/tree/doc/_static/fdl.txt
• GNU Lilypond: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/lilypond.git/tree/COPYING.FDL
• nano: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/nano.git/tree/COPYING.DOC

The first few I found scrolling through one of the searches linked in a previous post and backtracing to the actual repositories; the others by poking through https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/.

[waldyrious]

Just leaving a note that most of Wikipedia's content (in particular, all content published before 15 June 2009) is available under the GFDL. Since that's not the current default license for new content, it's probably not a good example to use in choosealicense.com, but given its sheer size and significance, I thought I'd mention it anyway.

[mlinksva]

GNU nano docs are using FDL-1.2, that's why the tests are failing. I'd like fairly clear examples, and for LilyPond and GSL it's pretty clear that their docs are what is licensed. I can't easily tell from looking at the repos of the various Qt examples what FDL-1.3 applies to. Are there any other clear examples?

@waldyrious I do recall.

[DWesl]

I can't easily tell from looking at the repos of the various Qt examples what FDL-1.3 applies to.

• PySide licenses the documentation under GFDL 1.3
• QtBase seems to license most .qdoc files under GFDL 1.3
• I found the Qt project's licensing document: documentation is available under GFDL 1.3 or a purchased license

[waldyrious]

@mlinksva shouldn't GFDL be explicitly mentioned in the Documentation section of https://choosealicense.com/non-software/?

[waldyrious]

@mlinksva shouldn't GFDL be explicitly mentioned in the Documentation section of choosealicense.com/non-software?

Ping :)