Re: A concrete proposal
Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:
> On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 09:22:20PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> > If I understand it right, his proposal would fit into BLANKTWO as
> > follows:
> > BLANKTWO OPTION AT: ", if they are debian-doc, various"
> > This would make the operative sentence:
> > "In addition, packages may contain, if they are debian-doc, various
> > other invariant text."
>
> No, that's not correct. An accurate, although perhaps imprecise, way of
> phrasing it, in toto, is:
>
> "Packages in main are not required to allow their copyright and
> license information to be changed. In addition packages may
> include any of a small number of texts and require them to
> be distributed unchanged with any copies of the package. Only
> texts which are (also) included in the debian-doc package are
> permissable for this exception."
Ah! Thanks for putting it that way, I think I understand now.
Ok, that would be fine with me, assuming that the relevant current
texts from "important manuals" are placed in debian-doc. It seems
they aren't yet, but I think there is hope for making that work.
> No, they simply need to be copied over to debian-doc, which requires us
> to find a copy of the GNU Manifesto that's distributed on its own, rather
> than inseperable from the GPL and the GFDL and the emacs Distribution
> info as it is in the Emacs manual.
Grab the one from the GNU web site.
> And again, this probably shouldn't
> apply to the "Distribution" section of the emacs manual, so the emacs
> manual would still probably move to non-free.
Sections like the "Distribution" section are very common in software;
I was assuming that it counted as text incidental to the license. The
Distribution section is rather more verbose, but it's very common to
have licenses that require the preservation intact of information
about how to get the original version of the program from the original
author.
> I find this the least objectionable of the suggestions that'd keep the
> glibc manual in main, but I don't find it unobjectionable, and I'm not
> sure it'd keep the emacs manual in main. It wouldn't keep the Gdb manual
> in main.
Ok, the gdb sections are twofold:
1: The "Free Software" section. I think that's really just like a
license text--it repeats what's already in the gdb package's copyright
statement. Indeed, it's conceptually a repeat of the rule that the
GPL is itself invariant; people are being told their rights about the
program. It may be that the FSF would approve changing this to the
text of the GPL or some other such equivalent.
2: The "Sample GDB Session" section. I have no clue why this should
be invariant; I've asked rms.
Thomas
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