1. Purpose of this Document

This document has been written in order to simplify the process of deciding which licenses are allowable for documents that are to be included as part of the Open Source Writers Group documentation set.

Rather than having a license-related debate every time a new open-source or open-content license is introduced, we here set out the basic "baseline" freedoms that each license must include in order to be "free enough" to be appropriate for use with documents that are associated with the OSWG. This policy statement has been made as simple as possible in order to avoid any future confusion or conflict about what this policy entails. Under no circumstances, however, should this policy be considered as "written in stone". If there is sufficient demand by members of the OSWG, this policy can and will be modified.

In this document, "documentation set" is a general term that applies to the full collection of documentation, papers, articles, books, FAQs, HOWTOs, and other written material that is associated with the Open Source Writers Group. Excepting for unusual circumstances, the full OSWG documentation set will be included within the OSWG CVS system available on the OSWG server. Where possible, OSWG documents will be made available in multiple formats including the original DocBook SGML source.