On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 04:06:30PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > I fear that one problem here is that I regard "Debian" as comprising > only the "main" archive. That's not a problem, that is correct. Programs That Don't Meet Our Free-Software Standards We acknowledge that some of our users require the use of programs that don't conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. We have created "contrib" and "non-free" areas in our FTP archive for this software. The software in these directories is not part of the Debian system, although it has been configured for use with Debian. We encourage CD manufacturers to read the licenses of software packages in these directories and determine if they can distribute that software on their CDs. Thus, although non-free software isn't a part of Debian, we support its use, and we provide infrastructure (such as our bug-tracking system and mailing lists) for non-free software packages. > Some people seem to have, in the back of their heads, that relabelling > the emacs manual as non-free is a mere bookkeeping change of no major > consequence, that moving it from main to non-free is a mere issue of > labelling. Some people like who? That people can still get Debian packages of the manuals if they want them doesn't mean that moving a package from main to non-free is more than a bookkeeping change. It is also an acknowledgement that said package is not (completely) Free. > Since Debian is only main, this is a proposal to remove the Emacs > and GCC manuals from Debian. Nobody is really aware of any other > important texts that have significant invariant sections than these > two manuals, IIRC. I feared that some of the stuff in doc-debian might have invariant sections, but none of it appears to. Everything is either under the GPL or the traditional GNU documentation license, which I have quoted several times on this list over the past few weeks. There is one possible exception. The Debian Manifesto bears no copyright notice (though it is explicitly authored by Ian Murdock), and is not explicitly mentioned by the doc-debian/copyright file. Therefore it might be in license limbo, unless he's made a statement about its licensing in the past. Or maybe the document belongs to the Project. In any event: Please note that this document is provided in order to document Debian's history. While the general ideas still apply some details changed. Even if non-free, the document could be removed from the package without causing any real disruption. -- G. Branden Robinson | Debian GNU/Linux | Please do not look directly into branden@debian.org | laser with remaining eye. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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