[RMS: I invite your participation in this process.] Summary: Per recent discussion on the debian-legal mailing list regarding DFSG section 3 and provisions of the GNU Free Documentation License that allow for non-modifiable "Invariant Sections", and "Cover Texts", I am proposing a guideline for interpretation of the DFSG that permits GNU FDL-licensed materials to be regarded as DFSG-free, provided certain criteria are met. Background: The Debian Free Software Guidelines and Social Contract: http://www.debian.org/social_contract The GNU Free Documentation License: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html Previous debian-legal discussion: http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200111/msg00006.html ...and most of the subsequent traffic for the month. Please read the above materials if you are not familiar with them before participating in this discussion. ***** Whereas: 1) The ability of users and developers to modify, and distribute modified copies of, software and ancillary material (such as documentation on how to use software) is held as a value by the Debian Project and the Free Software community; 2) Certain information such as the terms under which copyrighted material is licensed for reproduction and other activities outside the traditional scope of Fair Use is not considered to be an integral part of the software -- or other work -- so licensed; 3) The Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) neither specify, nor constrain the scope of, which materials distributed by the Debian Project must be modifiable and must permit redistribution of modified materials; 4) The actual text of the GNU General Public License (GPL), the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), and perhaps other licenses used within the Debian Project whose terms meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines are themselves copyrighted documents for which permission to modify has not been granted; 5) The Free Software Foundation, long a pillar of the Free Software community as we know it today, promulgates the GNU Free Documentation License, which permits authors to mark parts of a work so licensed as non-modifiable, as long as they are auxiliary to the main content (see sections 2 and 4L of the GNU FDL, as well as section 4 of the GNU FDL generally, for further restrictions on modification); 6) The Debian Project needs power to reject GNU FDL-licensed works if they employ Invariant Texts inappropriately, in contravention of the spirit of the License; 7) The Debian Project has a direct interest only in electronic data storage and transmission; restrictions that apply to printed material or other fixed, commercially-traded forms[1] are not of direct interest to the Project; I propose the following guidelines for interpretation of DFSG 3: 1) Copyright notices used as such (i.e., not as examples) are permitted to be held non-modifiable. In actual fact, modification of copyright notices is construed as infringement of copyright in many jurisdictions in the world. 2) License text used as such (i.e., not as an example), and applied by one or more copyright holders to a work submitted for distribution by the Debian Project, is permitted to be held non-modifiable. Only actual contractual license terms are protected under this interpretive clause. Material that is used to inform, persuade, exhort, or otherwise interact with the (putative) licensee but which is not legally binding is not convered by this clause. 3) For works whose primary purpose is as instruction code for a computer[3] An amount of auxiliary material whose function is to inform, persuade, exhort, or otherwise interact with the putative licensee but which is not legally binding is permitted to exist in conjunction with the license terms (and the packaging of the work so licensed may reflect this). Such material may not exceed 16 binary kilobytes (16,384 bytes) when viewed in plain-text form (treating all adjacent white space characters as one byte). Non-textual, binary data held as non-modifiable information by the copyright holder(s) also counts byte-for-byte toward this limit. 4) For works whose primary purpose is not as instruction code for a computer[3], a percentage of the work considered as a whole is permitted to be held non-modifiable by the copyright holder(s); this proportion must not exceed 5%. Furthermore, the non-modifiable component(s) must meet the following criteria: A) They must be incidental to the content of the work itself. Notices of authorship, acknowledgements, and editorial markup are examples of such incidental material. A good rule-of-thumb for judging whether material is "incidental" might be: "Is the value of the work in its own right diminished if this material is excised?" Consider how the work may be republished after it falls into the public domain when making this determination[4]. B) Non-modifiable components must be treated as being in the same format as the modifiable components when making the determination of proportion. In other words, supplying all non-modifiable parts of a work in compressed form so as to escape the 5% limit is not allowed unless the rest of the work is compressed the same way. 5) This proposal does not include any procedures for resolution of disputes regarding the meaning of the DFSG, the meaning of any particular license, the determination of the existence of or proportion of modifiable or non-modifiable material in a work, or any other such issues of possible contention. Any such procedures determined in the future notwithstanding, creative circumlocutions in the interpretation of these guidelines are discouraged. ***** I am seeking discussion of these guidelines, and outright seconds if anyone actually agrees with me. :) [1] This is a point that should be explored. A license that applied to CD-ROMs but not hard drive platters or to hard drive platters but not dynamic RAM is quite within the realm of possibility[2], so Debian needs to be careful not to constrain its interest too tightly. Perhaps Debian should require DFSG-compliance for all digital formats, as we do not want to hamstring the Project in the future as technology advances. [2] Witness efforts by the media cartels to pass laws forbidding the cacheing of "proprietary information". As I understand it, Windows Media Player and Real Player already support restrictions like this. <DaveBarry>I'm not making this up.</DaveBarry> Therefore the Debian Project needs to act defensively, and anticipate offensive action from those interested in a future of memoryless, storageless entertainment devices which supplant general-purpose computers. [3] Programs, libraries, scripts, hinted fonts, etc. Not images, sounds, music, manuals, poetry, novels, etc. The basis of determination shall be the intent of the author for the primary means of use (as far as can be determined), not the details of the encoding format of the data. [4] A typesetter's markup scrawled on a manuscript of _Hamlet_ may be of interest to some Shakespearean scholars or historians of typography, but _Hamlet_'s value as a play is neither augmented nor diminished by this markup, and since _Hamlet_ is in the public domain, any person is free to include or omit such markup. -- G. Branden Robinson | You live and learn. Debian GNU/Linux | Or you don't live long. branden@debian.org | -- Robert Heinlein http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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