Re: Do we really need a CPP manual?

[Joseph Myers <joseph at codesourcery dot com>]

On Mon, 19 Dec 2016, Florian Weimer wrote:

> On 12/16/2016 07:06 PM, Jeff Law wrote:
> 
> > That's likely the manual RMS kept asking folks (semi-privately) to
> > review.  My response was consistently that such review should happen
> > publicly, which RMS opposed for reasons I don't recall.
> > 
> > I don't see that manual as part of the GCC project and I certainly would
> > understand a disinterest in reviewing/rewriting C language manuals and
> > tutorials :-)
> 
> More language and related standards under free licenses could be a worthwhile
> goal, though.  I have no idea how tiresome this would be, and home much
> ideological objections to free licenses remain.

Maybe we should try to get SC22 to push for free licensing of language 
standards.  (For the past few years SC22 has been pushing back on 
complicated rules in the JTC1 Directives about use of the very clunky ISO 
Livelink system and about what sorts of documents are supposed to be made 
available to whom.  I'm not sure if the pushback has effectively reached 
SWG-Directives, however - or whether free licensing would need to be 
established at the SWG-Directives level, higher in ISO, or somewhere 
lower.)

When BSI consulted on the ISO strategic plan consultation for 2016-2020 my 
response said that all standards should be freely licensed (I said 'I 
would like to see these points reflected in BSI's response to ISO. ... 
Thus: the goal for ISO should be to "promote, disseminate, preserve and 
protect its intellectual property in 2020" by making it all freely 
available under Creative Commons or similar licenses, online in locations 
that get readily indexed by search engines'), but I doubt that this 
actually ended up in BSI's response to ISO.  (Programming languages are 
generally quite different from other ISO standards work, it seems; we've 
had to push back on other problematic rules like the one saying you can't 
issue a TC more than three years after the standard but have to produce a 
whole new edition in that case.)

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com