On Tue, 2003-07-01 at 18:33, Colin Watson wrote: > On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 11:31:03AM -0400, Emma Jane Hogbin wrote: > > On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 01:53:40AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote: > > > Sounds like the GFDL. You might want to have a look at debian-legal > > > archives on this topic; there are unfortunately various concerns about > > > its freeness as far as Debian's definition of the term is concerned. :-/ > > > > http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200304/msg00132.html > > http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200304/msg00243.html > > The summary seems to be that it's not a problem as long as there are no > > invariant sections. Since I have no intentions of making any part of the > > document invariant, I think this is a fine license for my needs. > > Unfortunately I'm not sure that the links you quote above represent a > general consensus in Debian. In particular, several people have > expressed the serious concern that the text in section 2 of the GFDL > forbidding the use of "technical measures to obstruct or control the > reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute" has the > effect of forbidding the installation of GFDLed documents on encrypted > filesystems, such as the USB memory stick on which I keep various useful > things like my GPG key. > > I'm aware I'm coming across as a pain here; I'm really just passing it > on. Due to issues like the above, as the maintainer of the Debian > doc-linux packages I'm likely to come under substantial pressure soon to > relegate all LDP documents licensed under the GFDL to non-free, and I'd > like to keep the number of affected documents as small as possible. > However, I'll stop here and not say anything more unless there are > specific questions; I think I've put forward my point as best I can and > your licensing decisions are as always yours alone. > > Cheers, > > -- > Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk] I think you are being fair on this one, Colin - I don't personally see the GFDL as being quite the "Free" license one would anticipate from the FSF. My own suggestion is that if some place is insisting on GFDL and nothing else for their collection (I hope nobody is doing that,) it might be an idea to see if the same document can be provided to Debian under a DFSG-Free license instead (the world of dual-licensing.) Since non-free is not distributed on the CD set or DVD for installation, documentation that is under a non-free license becomes rather useless for a "newish" user that hasn't yet established an Internet connection to gather the balance of the potential packages. Personally, I regularly dig into the various HOWTOs et al because no matter how well I know the underlying concepts and designs of various services on Linux, I am not configuring them regularly enough to know all of the considerations of everything to do things without the occasion burrowing into /usr/share/doc/HOWTO for at least clarification. To not have that available following an installation that didn't directly get on the Internet would be rather *annoying*. -- Mark L. Kahnt, FLMI/M, ALHC, HIA, AIAA, ACS, MHP ML Kahnt New Markets Consulting Tel: (613) 531-8684 / (613) 539-0935 Email: kahnt@hosehead.dyndns.org
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