Re: non free IETF's RFC documents in .orig.tar.gz
Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
> Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@becket.net> writes:
>
> > But, since RFCs are available elsewhere always, it's easier to just not
> > distribute them. We get the stupid thing of having N different packages
> > in debian that all put RFC 822 in /usr/share/doc. Pointless.
>
> > In my opinion, we should have a Policy statement that prohibits putting
> > RFCs in /usr/share/doc, and we can have an rfc package that includes the
> > ones that we can distribute and that people want.
>
> Sure. Not installing RFCs is easy. What's harder is omitting them from
> the upstream .orig.tar.gz files, as that isn't particularly "natural" to
> do using the common packaging tools and techniques.
Right indeed; I was confusing two separate issues. (And there are
already the relevant doc-rfc* packages.)
So the answer is: the RFCs with the standard Internet Society
copyright are non-free, because they prohibit modification. Other
RFCs might or might not be; it's a case-by-case thing. And the
"distribution is unlimited" notice means "this is not classified", and
doesn't really address copyright. Particular cases should be
discussed on debian-legal as usual.
The .orig.tar.gz file *must* be entirely DFSG free; one way is to
create a new tarball with ".dfsg" after the version number (as is now
done with the X source).
Thomas
Reply to: