Hello,
Lately several people have been writing documentation in
various forms, and that is terrific.
It seems appropriate for us to be a little more careful about
the licensing for such documents. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.
In the absence of any stated license, control of reproduction
and creation of derivative works (such as modified versions or
translations) is held by the copyright holders, who are the
authors unless the work is a work for hire or the copyright
is assigned to someone else.
So that is the present status of documents other than the
manual.
As for the manual, my opinion is that it is licensed under
the GPL (however that applies to a purely textual object)
like the rest of Maxima.
That said, I would like for us to specify a license for
texts other than the manual. At present that comprises
the web site text, some tutorial papers, the wiki site,
the Maxima book, and maybe some other texts.
Applying any given license to future authors is relatively
easy: we just make them agree to a disclaimer of the
form "I agree that my contribution is licensed under
license X". Slightly more difficult is to locate all authors
of existing material and get them to agree to some license.
I will suggest a few possible licenses: GNU Public License,
GNU Free Documentation License, Creative Commons
Share-Alike License. There are many others. I won't make
a recommendation at this time except to recommend
against releasing texts into the public domain.
Anyway I look forward to your comments on this.
Robert Dodier