There are two issues here: the DFSG-freeness of the CC SA-A license and the GPL-compatibleness of that license. I can't speak to its freeness right now, since I don't have time to read the 2.0 version in its entirety. But it's clearly not GPL compatible. To be clear, by "not GPL compatible" I mean that it is not possible to derive a work from works licensed under both the GPL and the CC-SA-A and distribute the resulting work.
It is certainly legal to distribute a GPL'd program with documentation which is under the CC SA-A license. I just don't think it's a very good idea from an engineering perspective. I'm mentioned in bug thread 256332 as someone who encouraged sleepycat to use compatible licenses for their documentation and code. This is because technical documentation often involves code snippets, and because comments often contain text copied from manuals. It is convenient if the licenses permit such copying back and forth. In the case of GNU Emacs, for example, there is a problem. Code has been copied from the program (GPL'd) to the manual (GFDL'd). The manual is a derived work of a GPL'd work, but is distributed only under the GFDL. The FSF may legally do this *only* because they own the copyright on all of the code in Emacs and on all of the text in the manual. Nobody else has the freedom to modify the system of code+manual in the ways that the FSF routinely uses. Had they distributed the manuals under the GPL, or some GPL-compatible license, then everybody would have the same freedom with respect to Emacs and its manual that Richard Stallman has. -Brian -- Brian Sniffen [EMAIL PROTECTED]
