FunnelWeb manuals copyright issues

[Yann Dirson <dirson@debian.org>]

[this is a mail I intend to send to the author of FunnelWeb - I'd like
to be sure of my interpretation - probably this requires
funnelweb-docs to be discarded ASAP from the archive]


Hi,

I have recently packaged FunnelWeb and its docs (in separate packages)
for inclusion in Debian GNU/Linux.  However, I had not realized that
the docs were not covered by the GPL.

Reading the copyright notice available at
http://www.ross.net/funnelweb/tutorial/copyright.html, I realize there
are problems for including them after all, because all packages
included must comply with the Debian Free Software Guidelines
(http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines).

So that I think you may be interested in knowing that we won't be able
to ship the manuals together with the software, for the following
reasons - I'd be grateful to you to confirm my reading of the
copyright.

I think it does not comply with:

- section 1 (free redistribution) - the copyright does not seem to
allow distribution of the docs without the software, whereas some
people may like to look at the doc before installing the software
itself.

- section 2 (source code) - I thought the HTML format you distribute
may not be the "prefered format for modification"

- section 3 (Derived Works) - these do not appear to be allowed

Also, the restriction on not putting them on online web sites may
cause problems, because it would be easy (and used to be the default)
on Debian boxes to export the doc directory as http://machine/doc/...,
and the user may then inadvertantly violate the licence.

I thought it would be a possible candidate for the "non-free"
distribution that we maintain as a service to the community, but the
copyright does not appear to allow distributing the docs separately
from the program, so I'm afraid we can't even distribute it like this.

The last possibility I see to have the FunnelWeb docs integrated in
the Debian documentation system, is to provide a "wrapper package",
which will allow the admin to automatically download the docs and
install them, but this, as well as the non-free solution, would
require net access for users who would like to browse the doc.

Best Regards,
--
Yann Dirson <dirson@debian.org>