On Wed, Jan 23, 2002 at 10:50:06AM -0500, Peter S Galbraith wrote:
> > They also told me that they don't want to allow the commercial
> > distribution of the book, anyway again in their opinion this doesn't
> > violate the DFSG.
>
> As someone who has packaged documentation before, I'm surprised that
> Debian would agree with this. It's clearly non-free for software, and I
> don't see what's so special about documentation to be exempt. The GNU
> Free Documentation License allows it.
Not really, the key point is the following: for software DFSG allows the
software to be used in a commercial environment, the same we can state
for documentation i.e. you can use the documentation in a commercial
environment.
But does DFSG require that the documentation can be selled buy itself?
Surely Gnu FDL require this, but does DFSG require the same?
Quoting from the DFSG:
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in
a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the
program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic
research.
O'Reilly editors now are not requesting that the book can't be used in a
business, they are requesting that the book itself does not became _the_
business.
So the quid remains.
> We really need policy on on free documentation.
Agreed.
Cheers.
--
Stefano "Zack" Zacchiroli <zack@cs.unibo.it> ICQ# 33538863
Home Page: http://www.cs.unibo.it/~zacchiro
Undergraduate student of Computer Science @ University of Bologna, Italy
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