Re: Is a free document whose sources have been lost free?
> Charles Plessy <charles-debian-nospam@plessy.org> writes:
> > To make the dialign-t package, I removed the documentation from the
> > upstream tarball, that I use for a dialign-t-doc package, in the
> > non-free section as the their LaTeX sources are not provided.
> >
> > Now, I was informed that the reason is that the sources have been lost.
> >
> > In that case, don't the .html, .pdf and .ps files become the "preferred
> > form for modification"?
Le Fri, Jan 25, 2008 at 08:08:48PM -0800, Russ Allbery a écrit :
> My opinion is yes, as explained in the copyright file for openafs-doc, and
> ftp-master apparently agreed sufficiently to let the package into the
> archive. (Although they weren't released under the GPL -- the specific
> license may make a difference, and I haven't checked what license
> dialign-t is under.)
Le Fri, Jan 25, 2008 at 10:35:16PM -0800, Don Armstrong a écrit :
> Unless the pdf is exceptionally complicated, it's not all that
> difficult to resurect LaTeX that does a similar job; it'd probably be
> ideal to do this and distribute the pdf files built from that, unless
> the underlying codebase never changes and you won't ever need to fix a
> bug in the documentation.
Thanks for your answers (and thank for the private answer I got as
well). I will prepare an update of dialign-t using unmodified sources
and ask for the removal of dialign-t-doc from non-free.
Actually, the documentation has been almost completely rewritten in
DocBook format for making the manpage of dialign-t for Debian, but I am
reluctant to replace the original html and pdf files: it is just like
adding my name into a work I have not done.
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
http://charles.plessy.org
Wakō, Saitama, Japan
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