Re: FAIwiki Copyrights
Scripsit Sean Kellogg <skellogg@u.washington.edu>
> As I understand it, Debian's responsibility is to ensure that
> everything (software, documentation, etc) distributed by Debian is
> done under a DFSG license... but is it Debian's intent to ensure
> that all "stuff" produced by said DFSG licensed software is also
> free? Strikes me that such a requirement means that I need to
> release any document I produce with OpenOffice under a free license.
It seems that you are misunderstanding the situation. At least, the
best way I can make your objection make sense is that you think
FAIwiki is a piece of software that somebody else can use to build a
wiki on their website. If that were true you would be right that the
software developers should not try to enforce a DFSG-free license on
the contents of other people's deployments. (And in fact if they did
attempt to enforce a specific license for contents, we would consider
the software non-free no matter what the license was).
However, if you follow the link given in the previous posting, you
will find that this is not the case. FAIwiki is not a piece of
software itself, but a specific website that happens be a wiki and
whose underlying software presents itself as a standard MediaWiki
installation.
This particular wiki is intended to collect information about FAI,
which *is* a software tool. The good people behind FAI want to make
sure that they can later copy pieces of text from the wiki to their
distributed documentation without preventing Debian from distributing
said documentation in main. This goal is laudable, and it is entirely
proper that they consider the license question with the DFSG in mind
before a lot of unknown users start contributing text to the wiki.
> Taking it to the next step... is there really anything wrong with
> using a CC license in this instance (granting that the CC license is
> non-free).
A non-free license would not allow contents from the wiki to be copied
into distribution that they hope for Debian to distribute with their
software.
--
Henning Makholm "Also, the letters are printed. That makes the task
of identifying the handwriting much more difficult."
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