Re: Bug#238245: Proposed plan (and license) for the webpage relicensing
To further underline what I have been saying, I object to any of my
(currently embarrassingly minor) contributions to the Debian web page
to be licensed under the terms of the proposed "Debian Free
Documentation License" or any other license which has been specially
drafted for the Debian web pages. We should be using existing, widely
examined and vetted licenses instead of bothering with writing our
own.[1]
If you have further questions about this issue, please e-mail me
privately off list so -www can go back to doing more substantiative
things.
On Sun, 23 Apr 2006, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 22, 2006 at 06:40:11AM -0700, Don Armstrong wrote:
> > Indeed, neither of the two licenses you've sent are just s/FreeBSD
> > Documentation/Debian/g; replacements... each of them have
> > contained other changes.
>
> 1- s/FreeBSD/Debian/
> 2- remove SGML as the sources, since it does not apply to all our
> documentation and, moreover, does not apply to the website (sources are
> mostly WML)
You have effectively removed any definition in the license as to what
source code is.
> 3- add HTML as an output
The license explicitly lists the output forms that can be generated
from the source which is definetly suboptimal.
> 5- add a reference to translations (could be considered a
> "modification" to the source, however they are not in
> international IP law)
Lets stop here before going any further: There's no such thing as
"international IP law". The very term "IP" is in itself a massive
confusion of three separate branches of law which differ widely
between different jurisdictions. Furthermore, it's definetly not clear
that in any of the jursidictions that I'm aware of that a translation
would not be subject to the rules of the license that apply to any
other form of derivative work. If you know differently, please cite
relevant law and/or cases.
> 2 and 3 are *technical* changes to notes, they do not affect the
> license at all.
2 and 3 quite clearly affect the license.
> I don't believe any of these changes introduces any new pitfalls,
> quite the contrary, it removes them.
> > With an MITed work there should be no confusion at all.
>
> There is no MITed "work" license,
I'm refering to a work licensed under the MIT license. If it's too
confusing, you can s/software/work/.
> the MIT license explicitly mentions software too.
If we can distribute it in Debian, it's software. We use work in place
of software to avoid this exactly line of argument, but it should be
abundantly clear what software means in this context.
> As for GPLv3, I will not get into details, but I rather not use that
> license.
You cannot use it yet because it does not yet exist in it's final
form. That said, if you have a problem with GPLv3, you should be
discussing those problems using gplv3.fsf.org so those of us who are
on committees can address the issues that you have with the license.
[Of course, if your issue is with copyleft licenses in general,
there's not much that I'm going to be able to do for you.]
Don Armstrong
1: Considering the fact that I've been relatively heavily involved in
the committee part of the GPLv3 process, I'd say that I have a
relatively reasonable understanding of the amount of work that it
takes to fully understand the consequences of a license change which
is not altogether grand in it's scope. It's 4 months into the process,
and we're still discovering new problems.
--
Of course, there are ceases where only a rare individual will have the
vision to perceive a system which governs many people's lives; a
system which had never before even been recognized as a system; then
such people often devote their lives to convincing other people that
the system really is there and that it aught to be exited from.
-- Douglas R. Hofstadter _Gödel Escher Bach. Eternal Golden Braid_
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
Reply to: