Comment by jefft255 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jefft255 | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused by this. Which free software has its documentation in a proprietary book? A textbook is not documentation². ROS, PyTorch, Tensorflow, Julia, Python, Emacs, you name it, all have free online documentation as well as non-free textbooks to learn those tools. Not sure about non-programming tools like Gimp or Blender. If the only way to learn how your software works is a print book, that's the issue, not the fact that this textbook is non-free.

²To me, documentation is a boring but exhaustive description of all the features in your software. A textbook is a nice introduction to the software in a linear fashion which doesn't necessarily aim to tell the whole story. After going through the textbook the user should be comfortable enough to look at the doc for the complete story.

It's ok to want to profit from publishing a textbook for free software IMHO, just as you can build a consultancy on free software (see Red Hat, Savoir-faire Linux). It's merely charging for your expertise and time. Somehow saying that these book should be made available for free online takes away from that. Doesn't matter if you say that it's ok to pay for the print version.

The article was originally written in 1996, and describes GNU policy. As a cultural artifact, it's been incredibly effective but is now outmoded, as what it describes is very solidly the norm, as you note. So today it serves as a statement of GNU policy and as a historical artifact, and isn't so much something that is relevant to today's readers.

Since the article specifically calls out Perl:

In the Perl 4 days (1991 until whenever Perl 5 (1994) gained critical mass), the O'Reilly book Programming Perl was the Perl documentation. Besides the book, the only other official documentation was the perl(1) man page, which (while lengthy at nearly 30,000 words) was not nearly as complete as the O'Reilly book.

Oh, didn’t see the date. Perhaps one should add (1996) to the title.

Thanks for the pointer, I was exactly asking myself "Was it written like in 90s?" Today the problem is too much information, not not enough of it.

This flows naturally from US copyright: all creative works are copyrighted.

If the documentation is not explicitly licensed, then there is a risk that your distribution of the documentation is a violation.

This solves the problem of unknown documentation licensing, and makes the documentation a copyleft work product of its authors, which guarantees that any future derivative work that is released is also under a liberal license.

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