I meant internet-only in relation to *images*.
It is burdensome to use *images* under the GFDL. Imagine attaching two pages of legalese to include one 3" X 3" illustration. It's not practical and there's no good reason to require it -- a simple tagline that says "this is licensed under X and Y, see this URL" is enough for me, personally.
That is -- yes, the GFDL was intended for longer printed works. I don't think it works well for short works or images outside of an electronic medium. What about audio works? I have a hard time imagining people including a copy of the GFDL in a CD cover -- it's longer than most linear notes.
I don't have any major gripes with the content of the GFDL, though I think it could probably be written a bit clearer in some parts. But the necessity to include the entire license, rather than, say, a reliable reference (a URL, a citation, whatever) to the license, seems to make it more practical in some mediums than others.
FF
On 11/29/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Fastfission wrote:
I think what you mean is Internet-only license. It is very easy to include the GFDL in an electronic medium. It is relatively hard to include it in a print one.
It's not even an internet-only license: The only major category of works (of which I'm aware) for which displaying the GFDL in its entirety is burdensome is *short* printed works. Longer printed works are, after all, what the GFDL was originally intended for, and in fact most of the license makes clearer sense with printed works than on the internet ("front-cover texts" and so on). Printing the GFDL in a 300-page book isn't too much of a burden.
It *is* true that the FSF doesn't appear to have anticipated the possibility that people might want to reproduce short excerpts from GFDL'd works, rather than always reproducing the entire work as a book.
-Mark
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