Re: License for documentation

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

On 9 Jul 1999 bruce@perens.com wrote:

> Stallman says the GPL does not apply to that texinfo documentation. That's
> rather disappointing. It also means that many Debian packages need the
> documentation license added to their copyright files.

There is a precedence that the copyright file can simply reference another
file where the license text can be found.

Since makeinfo copies the copyright statement from the beginning of the
.texi file into the .info file, the copyright statement can just
refer to that. So it would just be a question of adding, say

| The `info' documentation in /usr/info/foo.info.gz has its own license
| which is reproduced at the beginning of that file. 

If we want to be really foolproof we can also include

| Use the command
|   zcat /usr/info/foo.info.gz | sed '/^.$/,$d'
| to print the documentation copyright.

-- 
Henning Makholm