Re: Old manifesto boilerplate licence
On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 06:28:25PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> The following licence is used on a number of LDP documents:
>
> Please freely copy and distribute (sell or give away) this document in any
> format. It's requested that corrections and/or comments be fowarded to the
> document maintainer. You may create a derivative work and distribute it
> provided that you:
>
> 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.
>
> 2. License the derivative work with this same license or use GPL. Include a
> copyright notice and at least a pointer to the license used.
>
> 3. Give due credit to previous authors and major contributors.
>
> If you're considering making a derived work other than a translation, it's
> requested that you discuss your plans with the current maintainer.
>
> The Debian legal guys usually say that requirements for people making
> modifications to contact the author or similar are non-free, since it
> means that people in remote locations disconnected from the Internet
> can't distribute modified versions (the "desert island" test).
>
> However, clause 2 says that derivative works may be licensed 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
and the option to relicense under the GPL removes that problem. 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".
:-)
Regards,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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