On Mon, 7 Apr 2008 01:02:55 +0200 Rafael Laboissiere wrote: > [Please respect the M-F-T header when replying] Done. > > In the process of packaging octave-fixed [1] for Debian, we found a > licensing problem with a PDF file (fixed.pdf). This file contains the > following Copyright statement: > > Copyright (C) 2004 Motorola Inc > > Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual > provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on > all copies. > > Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this > manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire > resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission > notice identical to this one. > > Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual > into another language, under the same conditions as for modified > versions. This short license seems to be (a slightly modified variant of) the old license used by the FSF for GNU manuals back when the horrible GFDL had not yet been written... It meets the DFSG, as far as I can tell. It's a weak copyleft and I think it is not compatible with the GNU GPL (v2 or v3). > > This file was produced from TeXinfo sources that are not available in the > tarball but can be found in the SVN repository [3]. The question is whether > we are allowed to distribute the said PDF file, in particular if the > original sources are lacking from the tarball. It seems you are allowed *by the license* to distribute the PDF file without distributing the corresponding source. But you have to distribute source in the Debian source package, in order to comply with the DFSG. > > Also, the TeXinfo source file contains scraps that are extracted from other > files (*.cc) distributed in the tarball. These files are released under > GPL-2+. Does that constitute a violation of the GPL? It depends on several factors. First off, if those .cc files are copyrighted by the same rights holder (Motorola Inc, in the present case), then I would say those scraps are effectively dual-licensed by their owner. So no problem, in that case. Alternatively, if those scraps are short enough to be not covered by copyright or to be allowed by quotation rights, then I would say there's no problem. Otherwise, I suspect there may be a violation. If there's a violation, possible solutions are (in descending order of desirability): * persuade Motorola Inc to relicense the manual under the terms of the GNU GPL * persuade the copyright holder of those .cc files scraps to allow their inclusion in the manual (thus effectively dual-licensing the scraps) * discard those scraps from the manual, if at all feasible Please note that I haven't examined the files or the manual myself, so I could miss some unexplained detail. My usual disclaimers are: IANAL, TINLA, IANADD, TINASOTODP. -- http://frx.netsons.org/progs/scripts/refresh-pubring.html New! Version 0.6 available! What? See for yourself! ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == C979 F34B 27CE 5CD8 DC12 31B5 78F4 279B DD6D FCF4
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