Licensing of documentation

[Roger Price]

On Tue, 28 Jun 2005, Joe Armstrong (AL/EAB) wrote:

> > "Concurrent Programming in Erlang - Part 1".  Is this true ?
> Yes. Prentice hall retain the copyright by they have allowed
> us to freely distribute part I of the book.

> As regards the Erlang reference manual the latest version is 5.4.8 and it has an
> explicit copyright.
>
> It should be part of the open source Erlang release and as such be covered by
> the Erlang public License.
> ...
> It is the intention that everything on the erlang.org web site is covered by the
> Erlang Public License - otherwise it would not be on the site

Hello Joe, Thanks for the clarification.  I was thinking about publishing
a work derived from the distributed documentation, and licensed under GNU
GPL http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html or FDL
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html; but I understand now that this is
not possible.

The Erlang Public License (derived from the Mozilla Public License) is
incompatible with GNU GPL/FDL according to the Free Software Foundation
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#NonFreeSoftwareLicense

Cheers,
Roger