Re: LDP in main?
On Sun, Dec 02, 2001 at 06:11:24PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 02, 2001 at 03:48:41PM -0600, Colin Watson wrote:
> > On Sun, 2 Dec 2001 at 16:48:03 -0500, David Merrill wrote:
> > > On Sun, Dec 02, 2001 at 08:14:22PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> > > > You're right, of course, although there has been a lot of discussion
> > > > recently about how the DFSG should apply to documentation (especially
> > > > documentation licensed under the GFDL, because exercising some of the
> > > > options renders it non-free), so I'm not exactly sure where to draw the
> > > > line.
> > >
> > > We do not exercise any of those options. Only a few documents have
> > > invariant sections. Does that make it non-free? What options do? I
> > > would want to avoid them.
> >
> > I haven't followed the discussion in detail, but I understand the
> > problems are with invariant sections used on anything but rather small
> > sections of text (typically the copyright itself, a note about company
> > sponsorship, or things like that). Documents without invariant sections
> > are fine as far as I know.
VG>
> What appears to be uncontroversial at this point is the following:
[snip]
> I apologize in advance if someone mails you insisting that every single
> statement I have made above is 100% false. That sometimes happens when
> I make people angry. :) Please feel free to communicate any concerns
> or questions you may have to the debian-legal mailing list.
I just joined the list. Just what I need. More mail.
Our use of the OPL is compliant, and our use of the GFDL is also with
possibly an exception or two I could have missed.
We do have at least one document with a small invariant section. I don't
know of any others. I just wrote the author and asked him to remove
the invariant clause. I'll let you know what happens. Also, it is an
old document. We just archived it a few days ago so it's not in our main
collection. I don't know if you even include archived documents in
your package, but I suspect not. So no problem with those. The problem
is the other licenses.
A lot of our documents are under some form of the "LDP License"
which was a badly written hack thingie dating way back. It exists in
multiple versions with different requirements. But it wasn't
versioned. :-/
I don't have statistics on what documents use which version. I don't
even know how many versions there are, or what order they came in.
It's a nightmare and I don't even want to go there.
Documents that have no license are therefore theoretically under the
LDPL. It was the official policy at the time the docs were submitted,
although documents didn't necessarily reproduce it internally. Whether
that would stand up in court, I don't know.
Here are our current statistics, taken from the LDP database:
LICENSE DOCS PCT
? 8 1.96%
GFDL 51 12.47
GPL 67 16.38
LDPL 92 22.49
NONE 95 23.23
OPL 7 1.71
OTHER 86 21.03
PD 3 0.73
TOTAL 409
FREE 125 30.56%
NON-FREE 276 67.48
UNKNOWN 8 1.96
It's a sad state of affairs. But if this is bad, you should have seen
things before I started. It is a marked improvement.
When I started there were very few docs under free licenses. It's only
through lots of work that the FREE value is as high as it is now.
Also, expect the GFDL count to go up by ~10 from stuff I did on Friday
that just hasn't been posted to the database yet. Greg Ferguson will
publish them on Monday.
You can find up to date stats on http://db.linuxdoc.org any time.
--
Dr. David C. Merrill http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project david@lupercalia.net
Collection Editor & Coordinator http://www.linuxdoc.org
The number of error messages we put in front of people is a tragedy.
--David Cole, general manager of Microsoft's consumer division
(The Register, 09-02-99)
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