Re: changes and standards documents

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

>  Marcus> a) Without documentation, you can't use the software.
> 
> 	Does not apply to a standard. You use the standard by reading
>  it -- nothing has to be modified. A standard is not documentation for
>  a program.

Ok, lets take an example I know about:  Mgetty and the Class 2 Fax standard

AFAIK the Class 2 Fax standard is still not available in public, unless you 
pay for it, so it is not likely to ever be part of Debian (main or non-free)

[ As it happens, I have several copies of it, most of which have been tweaked
  by the modem manufacturers, so there are subtle differences between them,
  but that is a different issue. ]

The only public access one can freely get to the standard is by reading the
code of various fax programs available on the Internet, and working backwards 
to what the standard might be.

Lets say the restrictions on the standard were relaxed to the point that one 
were allowed to redistribute it as an ASCII text file, as long ad the md5sum 
was the same as the original.

We would then have the following options:

  1)  not distribute it anyway

  2)  distribute it in non-free
      (for example I might put it in mgetty-doc-nonfree.deb)

  3)  distribute it in main
      (so I might include it in mgetty-doc.deb)

IMO  1) is a disservice to our users, since it is a standard to which some of 
the programmes in main are written.

I also think 3) is wrong, since it gives the impression that there is no 
difference between this document and other parts of main, despite the
redistribution restriction.

2) seems to fit the bill quite well.  We give our users fairly easy access to 
the document, without contaminating main with non-free stuff, or causing 
confusion by requiring that the licences for documentation in main need to be 
read in detail before fixing a spelling mistake, for example.

Cheers, Phil.