Re: Licence oddity in Securing Debian Manual
Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> writes:
> [Rick, apologies for the CC if you are subscribed to this list.]
>
> On Thu, Aug 28, 2003 at 01:54:31AM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
>> This reminded me of something I noticed earlier today. The Securing
>> Debian Manual at
>> http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian-howto/ has in its
>> front material the following:
> [...]
>> Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
>> under the terms of the GNU Public License, Version 2 or any later
>> version published by the Free Software Foundation. It is distributed in
>> the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY.
>>
>> All well and good, so far. Appendix H of the Manual, in
>> http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian-howto/ap-chroot-apache-env.en.html
>> , has:
>>
>> This document is copyright 2002 Alexandre Ratti. It has been released
>> under the GNU-FDL 1.2 (GNU Free Documentation Licence) and is included in
>> this manual with his explicit permission.
>>
>> Doesn't that create a licence conflict?
>
> Yes.
No.
> Even RMS does not posit that the GNU GPL and the GNU FDL are
> compatible licenses. They are not miscible in a single work except by a
> party with copyright on the complete corpus. That's obviously not the
> case here.
True. But I read the phrase "This document... explicit permission" as
saying that Appendix H has a different copyright-owner, and has been
separately distributed under the GFDL1.2. The whole work is under the
GPL2, as said at the beginning. The only other explanation which
makes sense with the "explicit permission" comment would be that it's
under the GFDL, with a special "linking with the Securing Debian
Manual" exception -- unlikely, but the only way to know is to ask Ratti.
-Brian
> Please file a bug against www.debian.org, and feel free to quote this
> message.
--
Brian T. Sniffen bts@alum.mit.edu
http://www.evenmere.org/~bts/
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