Package: www.debian.org Version: 2.95 (june 2003) Severity: serious The Securing Debian Manual is GPLv2 overall, but contains a third-party GFDL inclusion, resulting in licence conflict. Ideal remedy, if possible, would be if the inclusion's author (Alexandre Ratti) were willing to dual-license (or grant a licence exception on) that work.
My use of "Severity: serious" derives from my attempt to interpret Debian Policy section 12.5 (Copyright information): Every package must be accompanied by a verbatim copy of its copyright and distribution license... I figure a problematic copyright notice / distribution licence doesn't substantively satisfy that "must" directive. If I erred, and this bug should be "Severity: normal", my apologies. ----- Forwarded message from Branden Robinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----- Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 12:52:27 -0500 From: Branden Robinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Rick Moen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: debian-legal@lists.debian.org Subject: Re: Licence oddity in Securing Debian Manual (was: Proposed addition to Debian web pages re: GNU FDL) X-Mailing-List: <debian-legal@lists.debian.org> archive/latest/15210 [Rick, apologies for the CC if you are subscribed to this list.] On Thu, Aug 28, 2003 at 01:54:31AM -0700, Rick Moen wrote: > This reminded me of something I noticed earlier today. The Securing > Debian Manual at > http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian-howto/ has in its > front material the following: [...] > Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document > under the terms of the GNU Public License, Version 2 or any later > version published by the Free Software Foundation. It is distributed in > the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY. > > All well and good, so far. Appendix H of the Manual, in > http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian-howto/ap-chroot-apache-env.en.html > , has: > > This document is copyright 2002 Alexandre Ratti. It has been released > under the GNU-FDL 1.2 (GNU Free Documentation Licence) and is included in > this manual with his explicit permission. > > Doesn't that create a licence conflict? Yes. Even RMS does not posit that the GNU GPL and the GNU FDL are compatible licenses. They are not miscible in a single work except by a party with copyright on the complete corpus. That's obviously not the case here. Please file a bug against www.debian.org, and feel free to quote this message. -- G. Branden Robinson | As people do better, they start Debian GNU/Linux | voting like Republicans -- unless [EMAIL PROTECTED] | they have too much education and http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | vote Democratic. -- Karl Rove ----- End forwarded message -----
