Re: Policies regarding content
Refdoc <refdoc@crosswire.org> writes:
> I am asking to figure out what policies you have regarding packaging and
> distributing arbitrary text content:
>
> We (CrossWire Bible Society) produce a programme library and a bunch of
> frontends for Bible study etc. (libsword, gnomesword, bibletime etc)
>
> We also have a huge bunch of e-book modules with texts, images etc of
> varying licences in our repository for free distribution. Other people
> have similar collections of e-book modules fitting to our software. Some
> sell them, most distribute their stuff freely with licenses ranging from
> entirely free to restricted to personal use or whatever in between.
>
> Some is supposed to be user editable.
>
> The format of the ebooks is zipped and indexed and chooped up OSIS XML,
> adapted to the specific use, but is essentially open. 2 different
> implementations exist to read them and more could join.
>
> All our frontends use usually a module manager to deal with such content
> - similar to gutenbrowser downloading texts from Project Gutenberg,
> which will interact with these.
>
> I am in conflict with a packager who wants to package these modules,
> considering them not content a la ebooks, but some core data necessary
> to run the programme akin to firefox plugins or CPAN etc, instead of
> seeing them similar to PDFs or ebooks for Gutenberg - you would not
> distribute a couple of choice PDFs to keep evince company or select
> default Gutenberg books for every Debian user to read.
The way Debian views it is this (understanding that I can't speak
officially for Debian, so this is just the view of a Debian Developer):
* Debian applies the same licensing requirements to text as it does to
software. In other words, for Debian to distribute any content,
including regular text, it needs to satisfy the requirements of the
DFSG. This means that it needs to be freely modifyable and
redistributable with modifications, it can't have restrictions like
"just for personal use," and the "source code" has to be available,
which in the case of text is the preferred form for editing if you
wanted to change something. In other words, the XML is fine if that's
what you'd edit if you found a typo; if it's generated from something
else, then Debian needs that something else to be included in the
package to distribute it.
* The viewer is judged on its own license independent of what it views
provided that there's some reasonable free use. In other words, as long
as some document meets the above requirement and the license of the
viewer itself is DFSG-free, Debian would be able to distribute the
viewer in main. If the viewer itself is free but no available document
meets the DFSG, things get a bit murky -- depending on the situation,
this may be something we wouldn't want to distribute in Debian proper,
but it would still be eligible for contrib.
The basic idea is that one should be able to install something from Debian
and use it without needing any software or content that isn't DFSG-free.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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