Re: RFC about copyrights and right package section for W3C docs.

[Marcus Brinkmann <Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de>]

On Sun, Sep 16, 2001 at 03:46:34PM -0500, David Starner wrote:
> If there's an exception for non-topical chapters, then why not for
> standards? A non-topical chapter is more likely to get out of date
> than a standard, which by design is intended to be eternally fixed.

Well, if you join the Austin group, you can see how a new version of a
standard evolves by editing the old version.

However, beside creating new standards (imagine w3c would go away, or the
open group, you'd need to start from scratch without borrowing from them),
standards are incredible useful to write documentation, like reference
manuals.  The glibc manual and the linux man pages would benefit greatly
from a free POSIX standard (I filed a bug recently because a missing point
in the mmap() function documentation in the glibc manual, but as I had read
the standard just a few minutes ago, I had to be careful not to copy what
the standard says, although it was only two or three lines of text).
And the gcc manual would benefit from a free ISO C standard.

In fact, it should bother you that some of the standards we build upon are
not even free for distribution, not to speak of modification.

As I occasionally have to deal with standards on the one hand and free
implementations on the other hand, I have stumbled more than once where I
wanted to use standards text to document my source or programs (last time
with a kill(1) implementation for shellutils).

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de