6.4 License for Manuals

Please use the GNU Free Documentation License for all GNU manuals that are more than a few pages long. Likewise for a collection of short documents--you only need one copy of the GNU FDL for the whole collection. For a single short document, you can use a very permissive non-copyleft license, to avoid taking up space with a long license.

See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl-howto.html for more explanation of how to employ the GFDL.

Note that it is not obligatory to include a copy of the GNU GPL or GNU LGPL in a manual whose license is neither the GPL nor the LGPL. It can be a good idea to include the program's license in a large manual; in a short manual, whose size would be increased considerably by including the program's license, it is probably better not to include it.