The libtool documentation, as contained in libtool.info, is currently licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL).
As you are probably aware, there is significant opinion that this
licence does not meet the requirements of the Debian Free Software
Guidelines (DFSG).
This means that the libtool documentation will not be able to be
distributed in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Instead the
libtool-doc package will most likely be relegated to the non-free
section of the archive, and under Debian policy, the libtool package
will not be able to recommend or suggest it to users.
Some people will probably believe this is Debian's problem; however the
DFSG is considered as good as any benchmark requirements for a "free"
licence, and is the basis for the Open Source definition (which afaik,
the GFDL also fails).
Also Debian has a prior history of obeying paragraph 1 of the Debian
Social Contract ("Debian Will Remain 100% Free Software"), and as I'm
sure you're aware banished Qt and KDE from the archive until the licence
was changed.
So assuming no compromise between the Debian Project and the FSF can be
reached -- I for one am extremely doubtful that any "talks" will be
fruitful -- after the next stable release of Debian, libtool's
documentation will not be available to Debian users.
This is basically an appeal to change the licence for the documentation,
even if simply to a dual-licence of either the GFDL or the GPL at the
user's discretion.
Is there any hope for this?
Scott
--
Have you ever, ever felt like this?
Had strange things happen? Are you going round the twist?
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