Martin, On Wed, Nov 13, 2002 at 11:30:23AM +0100, Martin Wuertele wrote: > So how about a set of Debian Free Documentation Guidelines in addition > to the DFSG? Documentation is not Software and thus imo different rules > apply to them. Imo for a docs it is enough if it is allowed to be > redistributed and quoted while restricting modification is not > necessary. Docs available for free redistribution and quoting do provide > more freedom than commercial docs and this imo needs to be taken into > account. No, that is too loose. How about something along the lines of 1) Free Redistribution: (as in the DFSG, §1) 2) Reformatting and Format Conversion: The license must permit reformatting and conversion to different file formats, as long as the contents of the documents themselves are not changed by this. 3) Derived Works of Descriptive Documentation: (as in the DFSG, §3) 4) Derived Works of Normative Documentation: The license must allow derived works either in the form of a modified document or in the form of a new document with references to and/or quotes from the original document. It may require derived works to carry a different name or version number. 5) No discrimination Against Persons Or Groups: (as in the DFSG, §5) 6) No discrimination Against Fields of Endeavour: (as in the DFSG, §6) 7) Distribution of License: (as in the DFSG, §7, with "program" replaced by "document") 8) License Must Not Be Specific to Debian: (as in the DFSG, §8) 9) License Must Not Contaminate Other Software: (as in the DFSG, §9) This is basically the DFSG, with the following changes: - Asking for source code to documents is rather pointless in most cases. Either the author already provides it anyway, or it usually isn't available anywhere but from the author directly, and may not be in a format readable with free software (FrameMaker, InDesign, ...). Thus we're not asking for "source", but rather for the right to reformat and convert as we see fit, just as we can recompile our programs. - Standards documents usually aren't meant to be modified. This is basically like the right of the author to ask for the source code to be distributed unmodified. The DFSG requires that we may distribute patch files in this case, I think the equivalent is a new document which references and quotes from the original, pointing out differences (just like a patch, only that it needn't be machine-readable). We can also drop the requirement about binaries from modified sources here. Still do solve: - Documents containing descriptive and normative parts. I'd like to treat these parts as separate documents, so 3) applies to the descriptive parts and 4) to the normative. This would gracefully solve the problem of the Invariant Sections in the gdb manual, where the file formats (normative!) are marked invariant. - Does 7) suffice to say that patents restricting implementation of a standard are not allowed, or should that be made explicit? - Do we need a requirement that a modified standard must be allowed to be implemented, or is that already implied by the other rules? - Example licenses? FDL without non-normative Invariant Sections, OPL without license options? Others? - What about the Emacs manual? The GNU Manifesto is invariant, but doesn't fall under "normative". Comments? Simon -- GPG Fingerprint: 040E B5F7 84F1 4FBC CEAD ADC6 18A0 CC8D 5706 A4B4
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