On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 09:07:52PM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote: > Andre Lehovich wrote: > > The upstream source for the manpages has received permission > > from IEEE to include text from the POSIX documentation in > > Linux manual pages. Debian has not distributed the POSIX > > man pages because until recently the license prohibited > > modification. > > > > The latest version (1.67, 20 May 2004) now allows > > modification, "so long as any conflicts with the standard > > are clearly marked as such in the text". Joey Schulze, > > Debian's manpages maintainer, thinks the need for clear > > marking may be a problem. > > Yeah, it's not actually free. :-( > > If it said something like "So long as no conflicts with the standard are > represented, explicitly or implicitly, as conforming to the standard", it > could be free. > > As it is, it seems to quite effectively prohibit (for instance) adapting a > printf manpage for use as a manpage for weirdf, a non-POSIX command. I see > no sane way to make sure that "conflicts with the standard are clearly > marked as such in the text" for such reuse. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Since there's no weirdf command in POSIX, there's no conflict with the standard. A conflict would be "POSIX says foo does A, but you say foo does B", not "POSIX says foo does A, but you say bar does A+B". The only way I can think of to create conflict in that instance would be to say "POSIX says the command to do A is foo, but you say the command to do A is bar", but I think that might be taking things a little too far. And in any case, conflicts aren't forbidden, you merely have to flag them as such -- and a note saying "The POSIX-approved method of doing A is foo" should suffice in that instance. I don't feel that forcing someone to add what amounts to a symlink to your original version in their derived work is necessarily free, though. I'm up in the air about the matter -- it feels freeish, but at the same time something tells me there's an alligator somewhere. I think asuffield's clarified version, if we could get the IEEE to accept it, would be a nice solution to the problem. - Matt
