I plan to send the following mail about removing non-free
documentation to d-d-a tomorrow. I would welcome if people would
check it for factual mistakes before I do so. Therfore also sending
this to d-legal because of my various statements about the freeness of
certain licenses.
TIA.
*** DRAFT *** DRAFT *** DRAFT *** DRAFT *** DRAFT *** DRAFT *** DRAFT ***
Hi.
Since one of our release goals for etch is to remove any non-DFSG-free
documentation from main here some comments from the release team on
the issue.
Contents:
1. Things to do
2. Dealing with non-free documentation in one of your packages
3. Filing bugs about non-free documentation
---------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Things to do:
- Identifying non-free documentation in main and making a mass-bug filing.
This should happen ASAP.
My current plan is to do 1) a grep run over all debian/copyright files
and search for known non-free licenses and then 2) do the same with
files whose license is often forgotten to be mentioned in
debian/copyright, e.g. man pages and info files. If you know of a
package with non-free documentation that will surely not be found
by one of these steps (either because the license is a non-standard
one or because it isn't mentioned in debian/copyright and only mentioned
in files one isn't likely to check) please feel free to file a bug about
that right now. Please read the section "filing bugs about non-free
documentation" of this mail though.
Known non-free documentation licenses are:
- GFDL
- CC licenses
- OPL and OpenContent License
- the current license for RFCs (see also #199810)
There is also some documentation under non-free software licenses
and under non-free home-made licenses.
- Implementing support for the BTS version tracking in britney (i.e. the
script that is responsible for the testing migration). Since bugs
about non-free documentation are likely to affect testing and unstable
versions of a package they should not hinder testing propagation of
the packages in most cases. Until britney supports version tracking
there is really no good way to achieve this. The code for that is
almost ready and just needs some adjustments on the BTS side to
go live.
- Setting up a overview page for the release team to track the status
of the filed bugs. We plan to do that with the new usertags feature
directly in the BTS but please refer to
http://release.debian.org/removing-non-free-documentation for now,
since there is no good way yet to give you a nice URL to the page
directly. We will post any useful URLs there.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
2. Dealing with non-free documentation in one of your packages
So what should you do if you find non-free documentation in one of
your packages?
1) Don't panic!
Take your time to deal with the issue. Now you still have it!
But you will have to start _now_. The fact that we haven't
yet removed packages from testing for RC bugs about non-free
documentation doesn't mean we wont doing it soon.
So if you haven't discussed the problem with your upstream yet,
if you plan to rewrite the documentation and haven't started yet,
if you want to ask for help with convincing your upstream or with
rewriting the documentation and haven't done it yet, DO IT NOW!
2) Identify the amount and sort of affected documentation and
choose a solution
If the affected documentation is really small (e.g. a very minimal man
page) you might consider rewriting it completely. In some cases this
might actually be faster than to try to contact the original author
and asking for a relicensing.
If the affected documentation is closely related to a piece of software
(and probably packaged with it), e.g. a man page for a executable binary
or a reference manual for a library, try ask upstream to relicense it
(or at least dual-license it) under the same terms as the software
itself. This is probably a good idea in any case...
In any other case you might ask the author for a relicensing (or
at least dual-licensing). There is no known DFSG-free license out there
though that was specifically designed for documentation. Something
like a BSD-style license should be fine but the lack of "copyleft"
might be disliked by the author.
If the author objects to relicensing the documentation you have essentially
two choices: 1) removing the documentation completely, 2) rewriting it.
In any case DOCUMENT YOUR CHOSEN SOLUTION IN THE BUG REPORT. If there
doesn't exist a bug report about your case consider filing it.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
3. Filing bugs about non-free documentation
I began to retitle bugs about non-free documentation to use a common
meta-tag in the subject. After the introduction of the usertags I
was urged to look into that as an alternative way of doing it and
it proved to be very useful.
So here the new way: After filing a bug about non-free documentation
please add a usertag "nonfree-doc" and one usertag that describes the
license, like "gfdl", "cc", "opl" for the common licenses or something more
descriptive like "non-commercial" or "unmodifiable" for custom licenses.
Please add these usertags under the user debian-release@lists.debian.org
You can do this with a mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] (or
[EMAIL PROTECTED]) like this:
<---------------------------------------------->
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
user debian-release@lists.debian.org
usertag 123456 + nonfree-doc gfdl
<---------------------------------------------->
If you want to add something to your bug's subject like [NONFREE-DOC]
to make it easier recognisable, just do it, it isn't mandatory though.
Gruesse,
--
Frank Lichtenheld <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
www: http://www.djpig.de/
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
