An advise how to apply for the TkMan author to change his license.

[Shaul Karl <shaulk@israsrv.net.il>]

TkMan is a graphical, hypertext manual page and Texinfo browser.
Besides a no-warranty part, TkMan license says that

	Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
	documentation for educational, research, internal corporate and
	non-profit purposes, without fee, and without a written agreement is
	hereby granted for all cases that do not conflict with the restriction
	in the first sentence of this paragraph, provided that the above
	copyright notice, this paragraph, and the following three paragraphs
	appear in all copies.
	Permission to incorporate this software into commercial products may 
	be obtained from the Office of Technology Licensing, 2150 Shattuck 
	Avenue, Suite 510, Berkeley, CA  94704. 
 
However the author (Tomas A. Phelps <phelps@ACM.org>) also writes that

	"... I hope CD-ROM distributors include it in their collections, which they 
	can do for free."

This made me think that the author considers the license to be too formal and 
not reflecting his true willingness to share his work with others. Does it 
make sense or is it that I am trying too hard to find a way to enable TkMan 
gets into main?
Following my conclusion about why the author has made his last statement I am 
considering applying to him with a request to modify the license to the GPL. 
I want to tell him that I think this is appropriate becuase: 
(1) My belief as to why he has explicitly added his remark for CD-ROM 
distributors.
(2) That the sum of the original license and the permission for CD-ROM 
distributors to include it in their collections includes for all practical 
matters all the interested parties in TkMan. Yet the current license does not 
let groups that are more committed to the promotion of the free software idea 
as well as distributing packages of software, such as Debian, to fully include 
it in their collection.
Does it make sense? Are there other arguments that might be raised? Can 
someone rephrase all the arguments in a better English?
Although I believe that there is a case here I also believe that I will not be 
able to fully take advantage of it. There for, if someone more experienced 
with this kind of stuff want to try then I believe it will be most helpful.


-- 
Shaul Karl		 		   shaulk@israsrv.net.il
	An elephant is a mouse with an operating system.