Hi everybody!
Debconf5 should be finished now and I couldn't attend... :-(
Thus, a few days ago I took a look at its website[1] and searched for
published papers to read.
I found the talks page[2] and some papers submitted by people who were
going to give a talk.
Sadly, their license status is really various and seldom DFSG-free.
I feel it as a pity that many papers presented at Debconf5 are
impossible[3] to ship in Debian main...
Unfortunately the call for papers[4] does not mandate DFSG-compliance
for the submitted papers.[5]
I think that the next Debconf6 should require DFSG-compliance for the
submitted papers.
Do you agree?
For Debconf5 instead, the situation was as follows a few days ago.
Some papers are released under the GNU GPL (good news).
Other papers are released under a non-free license or even have no
license at all (which implicitly means All Rights Reserved!).
Other papers are not released at all...
The license table is:
Paper title Author(s) License
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Debian release management Andreas Barth no one
Debian Women and Women in... E.Clark, M.Onsoien no one
Multiarch - An a proposal... Tollef Fog Heen [no paper]
Debian-Kernel Team Overview... Dann Frazier GPLv2+
"DFSG-free" panel discussion Matthew Garrett [no info]
Debian New Maintainer Process... Dafydd Harries [no paper]
Securing the testing distr... Joey Hess GPL
Linda - A Debian package... Steve Kowalik no one
Debian Website Round Table Frank Lichtenheld no one
Are we really devoted to... Margarita Manterola no one*
Debian Installer - a... C.Perrier, H.Levsen, J.Hess GPL
Custom Debian Distributions Andreas Tille [no paper]
Debbugs, tips, tricks and hacks Anthony Towns CC-by-sa-v2.5**
Debtags Enrico Zini GPLv2+
* moreover no source is provided (unless Margarita prefers to write
directly in DVI...)
** this license has never been analysed on debian-legal but shares many
unsolved issued with CC-by-sa-v2.0, which was judged to be non-free[6]
I think that authors of unlicensed (and thus undistributable) papers, as
well as authors of non-free papers should be contacted and /politely/
asked to republish their paper in a DFSG-free manner.
Do you agree?
Any volunteer to help me in privately contacting authors?
There are only 6 papers to fix...
Notes:
[1] http://www.debconf.org/debconf5/
[2] http://www.debconf.org/debconf5/about/talks
[3] whether packaging Debconf papers and distributing them in Debian
is or isn't a good idea is entirely another question: what I'm concerned
of here is "would it be possible from a Policy point of view?"
[4] http://www.debconf.org/debconf5/news/call_for_papers
[5] I thought it did mandate a license, but, upon rereading it, I
noticed that the only statement that talks about licenses refers to live
presentation recordings (and not to papers).
[6] http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary.html
--
:-( This Universe is buggy! Where's the Creator's BTS? ;-)
......................................................................
Francesco Poli GnuPG Key ID = DD6DFCF4
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