Re: license requirements for a book to be in free section
On Wed, Jan 23, 2002 at 11:16:54AM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> Sven <luther@dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr> writes:
>
> > Well, i think they grant the right to distribute it in electornic
> > form, ity is just for the printed version that they don't want to
> > give permission, thing that i consider normal for a book publisher.
>
> Debian's standards are not governed by "what is normal for
> publishers".
Did i write otherwise ?
I was just stating the fact of what i think they meant in their license, and
that the hope of their changing is very low indeed.
I also said that the DFSG may not be very clear about this, as the unclearness
of the responses i receive here prooves, and thus that it would be better to
clarify somewhere what the DFSG means for documentation, so it is clearly
written, and there will not be long debates about it in the future.
My personal opinion on this matters is that the books belong into non-free,
based on my reading of their licence, and their probable intentions behind it.
I also feel that many other documentation in electronic form will have similar
restriction, and that for comparative reasons, we may not be able to put them
into main. This way we loose potential valuable documentation, but in my
interpretation of the DFSG, there is no other way.
Then, there is the ideological debate we could have, about if this is a good
thing or not, and if the DFSG was meant to be applied to documentation also,
and not to just programs, and if we go down this path, we should also specify
using only free hardware also, which is a thing which doesn't exist right now,
at least i have no knowledge on such.
All that said, the real point i was making is that we could clarify the DFSG
on this point, so as to avoid confusion on this issue.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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