Re: license change for POSIX manpages
MJ Ray wrote:
>> Redistribution of this material is permitted so long as this notice and
>> the corresponding notices within each POSIX manual page are retained on
>> any distribution, and the nroff source is included. Modifications to
>> the text are permitted so long as any conflicts with the standard
>> are clearly marked as such in the text.
>
> It would be nice to remove "in the text" from the end of this, I think.
Agreed. "In the text" could imply "right next to where you differ from
the standard", which would probably be unreasonable enough to be
non-free. Without the "in the text", modifiers could simply add a
blanket notice somewhere in the distributed work saying "this has been
changed and may not match the POSIX standard", which is a reasonable
requirement.
One other issue: does "and the nroff source is included" mean that if I
want to hand someone a printed copy of a manual page, I have to either
print the nroff source or supply it on an attached disk? This seems
onerous for physical distribution.
> It maybe also depends what the corresponding notices look like: are they
> just copyright assertions?
This clause doesn't say what the notices should look like, which seems
like a good thing. I don't think this has anything to do with copyright
notices; the kind of notice they are talking about is an explicit
disclaimer of endorsement and of conformance to the standard.
- Josh Triplett
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