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Re: Is distribution of the maxdb-doc package a GPL violation?
"Frank Küster" <frank@debian.org> wrote in message [🔎] 867j5csdw6.fsf@alhambra.kuesterei.ch">news:[🔎] 867j5csdw6.fsf@alhambra.kuesterei.ch... 
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?


It looks like these files are exported from SAP KW, which is
an enterprise-level content delivery system.
Based on a leaked (and poorly redacted) peice of
documentation, it appears that documentation is actually written
and maintained in MS word format. However, that is the version
in which the document is edited. Normally people access the documents
"online" in an html format (automaticly regenerated from the word document).
The documents can also be exported to HTML.
That is likely what MySQL AB does to create their doc packages.

So the real source is a Microsoft Word docuement. However, I suspect
Debian users would normally "prefer" to edit HTML files, than MS Word Documents. It is also entirely possible that the files are really HTML to begin with, so the real 
difference between the source and distibuted versions would be that comment.
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