Sorry for the 3 GFDL-related e-mails in a row, but I discussed some of
this stuff with my solicitor today, who I was seeing on an entirely
unrelated matter but who quite enjoys these little discussions we have.
His opinion is that the following is entirely legal and breaches neither
Copyright or the licence of the documentation, in the UK at least.
1. Locate your upstream's CVS repository, and locate the revision at
which the licence of the documentation was changed to the GFDL.
2. Checkout the revision before that.
You now have a copy of the documentation licenced under a hopefully
DFSG-free licence, if you don't what was it doing in Debian in the first
place, eh, eh? :)
3. Request the patch from that revision to the next.
a. This patch will hopefully be solely the licence change.
b. You have no permission to change the licence text in the
documentation file(s) you hold on your hard drive.
c. Therefore you may not apply this patch, throw it away.
4. Request the patch from the revision containing the licence change to
the HEAD.
a. This patch should not include any licence changes.
b. This patch simply includes changes to the documentation.
c. This patch is an *entirely*separate* work to the documentation
file(s) it modifies.
i. The patch file is implicitly copyrighted by the upstream author.
ii. The patch file includes no terms allowing copying,
modification, distribution, etc.
iii. It is, however, perfectly legal to /use/ this patch, either by
performing the actions it suggests by hand or with a program
such as "patch".
iv. The resulting modifications to the documentation text, even
though they are the result of the instructions of the separate
work, fall under the licence of the documentation text which
allows such modification.
5. Apply this patch to your documentation file(s).
You now have a copy of the latest upstream documentation under the
original DFSG-free licence, and entirely legally too.
Scott
--
Have you ever, ever felt like this?
Had strange things happen? Are you going round the twist?
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