GFDL corpus

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See also: GFDL text corpus

The GFDL corpus is the collection of all manuals, documentation, and other literature distributed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. As the license states in its preamble, "The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other functional and useful document "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially."

Yes, the GFDL corpus is popular. Copyright normally prevents the public from copying and editing manuals and textbooks, but that is exactly what they do to texts in the GFDL corpus: improve and update material written by others, adapt material to different situations, and give or sell copies without paying royalties. (Note that this freedom is not appropriate for all documents!) The GFDL corpus presently includes at least the material made available by:

You can visit a GFDL corpus access provider, a place that allows you to retrieve and edit this material. Doing so is a good idea; the GFDL corpus is a mostly free, mostly copyleft collection that is far superior to the Creative Commons.

The GFDL corpus is mostly free

For best results, when writing for the GFDL corpus, you should not include declare any Invariant Sections or Cover Texts, nor include any sections Acknowledgements or Dedications. These encumbered sections have additional requirements that limit how your document can be used within the GFDL corpus.

The problem may not be obvious at first. For example, GNU Emacs is a text editor, a computer program for editing text files, and the GNU Emacs Manual is a free manual to GNU Emacs distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License, and thus part of the GFDL corpus. However (in addition to other encumbered sections) it contains an Invariant Section called "Distribution", which describes how to obtain GNU Emacs. Note that the GFDL requires that an Invariant Section "deals exclusively with the relationship of the publishers or authors of the Document to the Document's overall subject (or to related matters) and contains nothing that could fall directly within that overall subject." The "Distribution" section explains how the authors provide GNU Emacs and contains nothing directly about the overall subject of using GNU Emacs. The manual remains free, if you want to change how you want readers to use GNU Emacs, go ahead! No problem, is there?

The GFDL corpus, as a whole entity, is about potentially everything. Material can be about anything agriculture to sociology, can take any form from fiction to how-tos, and can even be about how to use GNU Emacs... or how to obtain GNU Emacs. The free, GFDL corpus document about how to obtain GNU Emacs cannot adapt any content from the GNU Emacs Manual because it would have to include the "Distribution" section - consistent with the requirement in GFDL section 4J to preserve the section - because the overall subject is now how to obtain GNU Emacs, and the "Distribution" section now falls directly within that overall subject. Therefore, the GNU Emacs Manual, which is free in the context of using GNU Emacs, is not free in the wider context of a GFDL corpus.

The GFDL corpus is mostly copyleft

Some parts of the GFDL corpus are exempt from copyleft.

Links

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