[I assume that since RMS has asserted that he is not "on speaking terms" with
me, that he doesn't particularly care to be CCed on this mail. I therefore
offer this for the interest of my fellow Debian developers.]
On Sun, Sep 07, 2003 at 04:24:44PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> The situation is the same with the simple license we used in the past
> for manuals with no invariant sections. Yet nobody is saying that
> that license is non-free. It looks like a double standard is being
> applied.
The "simple license" -- what I have been calling the "traditional GNU
documentation license", reads as follows:
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this
manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are
preserved on all copies.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of
this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that
the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a
permission notice identical to this one.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this
manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified
versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a
translation approved by the <copyright holder, or an organzation to whom
the copyright holder is willing to delegate this function>.
This license is obviously (to me) DFSG-free:
* There are no use or copying (as such) restrictions at all.
* Permission to modify is unfettered except for preservation of license
terms.
* Permission to redistribute is unfettered except for preservation of
license terms.
This license is not, in general, compatible with the GNU GPL:
* Works under this license cannot be combined with GPLed works unless
those works are dual-licensed under this license. That is what I
understand the second sentence of this license to mean.
The GNU FDL is significantly more complicated than this license, and
most certainly has more restrictions. Two prominent sticking points
with the GNU FDL, version 1.2, are the fact that permission to modify
parts of the work can be withheld by the copyright holder and an
abitrary number of sublicensees who add their own invariant sections,
and the fact that copying and distribution are restricted to
technologies in which any form of access control is disabled or
nonexistent.
Works that used to be under this DFSG-free "traditional GNU documentation
license" include:
* GAWK: The GNU Awk User's Guide; Edition 2, "for the 3.0.3 (or later)
version of the GNU implementation of AWK."
This manual's new license is:
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with the
Invariant Sections being "GNU General Public License", the Front-Cover
texts being (a) (see below), and with the Back-Cover Texts being (b)
(see below). A copy of the license is included in the section entitled
"GNU Free Documentation License".
a. "A GNU Manual"
b. "You have freedom to copy and modify this GNU Manual, like GNU
software. Copies published by the Free Software Foundation raise
funds for GNU development."
* Debugging with GDB; "GDB version 5 May 2000"
This manual's new license is:
[GDB's top info node does not discuss its license terms; it merely states
copyright. Aren't GNU FDL-licensed manuals supposed to provide clear and
obvious notice of their terms?]
[If we view the 3 info files in GDB with a text editor, we can see the
following:]
/usr/share/info/stabs.info.gz:
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU
Free Documentation License".
/usr/share/info/gdb.info.gz:
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with the
Invariant Sections being "Free Software" and "Free Software Needs Free
Documentation", with the Front-Cover Texts being "A GNU Manual," and
with the Back-Cover Texts as in (a) below.
(a) The Free Software Foundation's Back-Cover Text is: "You have
freedom to copy and modify this GNU Manual, like GNU software. Copies
published by the Free Software Foundation raise funds for GNU
development."
/usr/share/info/gdbint.info.gz:
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU
Free Documentation License".
* GNU Make; "Make Version 3.77"
This manual's new license is:
[GNU Make's top info node doesn't discuss licensing either.]
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU
Free Documentation License".
* "Texinfo: The GNU Documentation Format"; "for Texinfo version 4.0, 28
September 1999".
This manual's new license is:
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License,
Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software
Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with the Front-Cover texts
being "A GNU Manual," and with the Back-Cover Texts as in (a)
below. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled
"GNU Free Documentation License."
(a) The FSF's Back-Cover Text is: "You have freedom to copy and
modify this GNU Manual, like GNU software. Copies published by
the Free Software Foundation raise funds for GNU development."
Here are the versions I used for researching new license terms:
gawk 3.1.3-1
gdb 5.3.20030824-1
make 3.80-2
texinfo 4.6-1
We can thus see that Cover Texts have been added to all of these
manuals, and Invariant Sections to half of them.
--
G. Branden Robinson | I must despise the world which does
Debian GNU/Linux | not know that music is a higher
branden@debian.org | revelation than all wisdom and
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | philosophy. -- Ludwig van Beethoven
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