Re: Is distribution of the maxdb-doc package a GPL violation?

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Guido Trotter <ultrotter@debian.org> wrote:

> Hi!
>
> I've been asked by the debian release team to look into this bug and see what
> can be done to have a successful resolution... The situation seems to be this
> one:
>
> 1) maxdb-doc is a package which contains some GPL licensed html manual files
> 2) the GPL asks for the source code (defined as: "preferred form of the work for
> making modifications to it") to be available
> 3) the html files are determined to be automatically generated by a tool called
> "SAP Html Export", and the files which originate them are not available

This sounds like as if the content was in some weird format before,
maybe a database with SAP frontend?  If this is true, the first thing
you'd do if you want to maintain *and* distribute the content as part of
some software would be to export it from that database.  Not only
because the database is non-free, but also because it doesn't seem like
a preferred form of modification if you want to edit documentation, and
if you want it to be packaged in a tar.gz.

If this is true, I don't see why this is necessarily "missing source".
Where the files exported a long time ago, and are now maintained as html
files?  Or are they newly exported every release?

Regards, Frank

-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)