FW: R. H. Rand's permission: german translation of your "introduction to maxima"[Scanned]

Hello Robert and Volker,

> Am 16 Jan 2006 um 19:29 hat Robert Gloeckner geschrieben:
>
> > Do you mind me putting all the documentation under General Free
> > Documentation Licence?

My recommendation, which is not binding on anyone, is the following.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

(1) Make sure that all copyright holders agree to the license terms.
It seems best to put their written agreement somewhere in the
document file itself.

(2) Release the document under the terms of GPL (instead of GFDL).

Bear in mind that the copyright holder of a "work for hire"
(e.g. something written as an employee) is typically the party
who paid for the work. Also, the copyright holder of a book
or a printed journal article is typically the publisher.
A translation is a "derivative work" and it is controlled by the
copyright holder of the original. There are many other special cases.

After some discussion on the mailing list, I came to the conclusion
that the GPL is better for Maxima documents than GFDL.
(1) GPL covers the rights which seem important, namely
right to copy and distribute the original document,
and right to create and distribute derivative works.
(2) If a document is GPL then text can be copied back and forth
between source code and the document since the Maxima
source code is GPL also.
(3) GFDL has some wierd complications such as the invariant
sections stuff. The Debian project has an analysis
of the GFDL at their web site and their conclusion is that GFDL
is not actually free by the Debian definition.
(4) GFDL is very long and complex. GPL is long enough already,
no need to go for something even longer and less well understood.

I hope this clarifies the situation. Thanks a lot for all your work.

All the best,
Robert Dodier