On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 05:05:32PM +0200, Osamu Aoki wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 17, 2005 at 09:47:34PM +0200, Francesco Poli wrote:
> > Debian-reference copyright notice reads:
> > 
> >   This document may used under the terms the GNU General Public License
> >   version 2 or higher.

[snip]

> >   [See /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2 for text of GPL v2]
> > 
> > 
> > The work is thus released under the GNU GPL (v2 or later),
> 
> Yes absolutely.

Ahm, why? In previous discussions you, Osamu, told me that this is not
true because of the usage of "may" in the above sentence. According to
you it's the users choice whether he want to consider the document
licensed under GPL or under the text mentioned below this sentence which
is only GPL like.

> If you see GFDL reference in the source sgml, it is clearly meant to be
> dual license.  The thought was I wanted it to be compatible if the world
> moved to GFDL.  That did not happen and it makes these words stay in the 
> souce SGML only :-)  Besides, Chapter 2 and other contents I borrowed
> was GPL2.  So the whole documents can only be distributed as GPL2.  The
> only parts I wrote can be GFDL if someone care to make it so.

OK. When the whole documents can only be distributed as GPL2 you should
say so:

This document s/may used/is licensed/ under the terms the GNU General Public 
License
version 2 or higher.

Or am I wrong?

> > The canonical copyright notice for a work released under the GNU GPL v2
> > or later is something along the lines of
> > 
> > 
> >   Copyright (c) 2001-2004 Osamu Aoki <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > 
> >   This work is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
> >   it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
> >   the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
> >   (at your option) any later version.

Mhh, even the official text uses "can" not "must". This means that the
user can reject the GPL license in which case no license applies and so
it is much more restrictive than GPL (no changes allowed).

Confusing!!??

> > Could you please clarify the copyright notice?

Osamu, please remember the the sentence

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this
document into another language, under the above conditions for modified
versions, except that this permission notice may be included in
translations approved by the Free Software Foundation instead of in the
original English.

(which is extracted from GPL?) should be fixed, since the user doesn't
generally recognises that this is an excerpt of GPL and translation
refers to translations of GPL.
The Free Software Foundation is not responsible for Debian Reference
translations.

Jens


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