On Mon, May 12, 2003 at 12:50:38AM -0700, David Lawyer wrote: > On Sat, May 10, 2003 at 03:42:42PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote: > > On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 06:28:25PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote: > > > 1. Send your derivative work (in the most suitable format such as > > > sgml) to the LDP (Linux Documentation Project) or the like for > > > posting on the Internet. If not the LDP, then let the LDP know > > > where it is available. [...] > > > The Debian legal guys usually say that requirements for people > > > making modifications to contact the author or similar are non-free, > > The premise that this license contains such a requirement is false. > It's only requested (not required) that the author be contacted.
By "author or similar", I was including the requirement to "send your derivative work ... to the LDP ... or the like for posting on the Internet". It's a weak requirement, true, but Debian does have users without Internet access and we've promised not to put that requirement on them even if they want to change stuff we distribute. > > > However, clause 2 says that derivative works may be licenced under > > > the GPL. May I consider this mail as the required notification to > > > the LDP that Debian will be distributing trivial (i.e. unchanged) > > > derivative works of all HOWTOs and mini-HOWTOs using this licence > > > from http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/doc-linux/, and > > > distribute them all under the terms of the GPL instead? The original > > > licence will be included in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright, the standard > > > location for copyright notices in Debian packages, within the > > > packages provided there. > > > The above and this mail are notice that the Debian doc-linux-html and > > doc-linux-text packages will adopt this practice as of the next > > release, since the "send your derivative work to ..." clause is a > > problem for us > > Well, if you don't send it to LDP then you must let the LDP know where it > can be found. As above, our current version will always be available from http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/doc-linux/. There will be no actual modifications to these documents other than the packaging; you can verify this by looking at the *.diff.gz files. > > and the option to relicence under the GPL removes that problem. > > But it introduces new problems. GPL wasn't intended for documents. Yet I > would prefer it over GFDL. I would suggest that anyone who has problems with the GPL for documents shouldn't use a licence that mentions it, though. :-) > > I think it's reasonable to assume that authors don't object > > to this; if they do then I wonder why they're using a licence that > > says "... or use GPL". :-) > > Once in GPL, there's no escape to another license, but in this case there > is a way around this since it's also under the boilerplate license. > Since anyone who wants to modify it will likely go to LDP for the latest > copy, they will find it there with the boilerplate license so they will > thus have more choices. Yep, no problem there. > So what you propose doesn't cause any significant harm, but I think > that going ahead with this is introducing unnecessary complications > for people creating the Debian packages. Well, I'm the person creating the Debian packages; I've been told in the past that I can't keep the licence above in the main distribution, and since I don't want to move documents to non-free if I can possibly help it (I've just split out the Debian packages between free and non-free, and I only had to move under 10% of documents) I'm making the best effort I can to draw a compromise between that and honouring the copyrights. I do realize that it sounds ridiculous and that authors are probably bored by the legalities; personally I'd rather be programming than having to worry about this stuff. I like licences such as http://en.tldp.org/COPYRIGHT.html; it's a nice simple documentation licence which does a reasonably good job of protecting authors' rights without causing problems for distributors. > PS: I mistakenly let my spell checker change "licence" to "license" but > then found out that "licence" is a valid alternative to "license" so I > attempted to restore it. Yeah, I speak British English. :) Cheers, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
