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LDP Weekly News
2002-03-05

by David Merrill 

New Version of the GFDL

The Free Software Foundation is working on a new version of the GNU Free Documentation License. The new version of the license clarifies some wording with respect to invariant sections and front matter, and places limits on their size and the ways they can be used.

We recommend for compatibility reasons the GNU FDL or the OPL v1.0 with options A and B not applied. OPL v2 does not meet our requirements. Some authors using the GFDL may find that the newest version adds too many restrictions, especially on non technical sections content or cover pages content. However, the LDP considers licensing to be the author's choice, not the LDP's. We have some general guidelines about licensing, because of our need to freely distribute documents, but we do not require any specific license. Our Manifesto specifies the characteristics a license must fulfill. LDP authors are free to choose the license they want, as long as the basic guidelines from our manifesto are respected.

The LDP will remain neutral in license choice or license version questions, as long as the LDP manifesto is respected. Therefore, we suggest anyone using the GFDL reads http://www.fsf.org/licenses/fdl.html and makes their own decision about whether or not to adopt the new version of the GFDL. That page includes a diff which shows the differences between each version of the GFDL.

New Documents

Updated Documents

Unmaintained Documents

These documents have been abandoned by their maintainers and many of them have not been updated in some time. If you're willing to become the maintainer for one of them, please join the LDP discussion list at lists.linuxdoc.org and post a message indicating your interest.

About the LDP

The Linux Documentation Project is developing free, high quality documentation for the GNU/Linux operating system. This includes the creation of HOWTOs and Guides, and collaboration with other documentation groups.

If you've always wanted to help Linux reach Total World Domination(tm), but you're not a programmer, there's still something you can do. Help the LDP!

The LDP keeps a page of resources for authors at http://www.linuxdoc.org/authors/. Contributions are always welcome.

For more LDP Weekly News, go to http://www.linuxdoc.org/ldpwn/