Le Ven 13 Janvier 2006 00:09, martin f krafft a écrit :
> also sprach Adeodato Simó <adeodato@debian.org> [2006.01.10.0455
+0100]:
> > Formally, the Debian Project will include in the main section
> > of its distribution works licensed under the GNU Free Documentation
> > License that include no Invariant Sections, no Cover Texts, no
> > Acknowledgements, and no Dedications, unless permission to remove
> > them is granted.
>
> I'm a late entry to the thread, please excuse.
>
> If we kicked all GFDL out of main, how many upstreams would
> reconsider their choice of licence? None? Few? Some? Many?
The QT-KDE Team has contacted KDE people about the GFDL issue, and the
answer has been very polite. I'll quote it here :
There are no invariant sections in *any* KDE documentation.
There are no Front-Cover texts, and there are no Back-Cover texts.
*ALL* our documentation that uses the FDL is licensed under the
following terms:
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License,
Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software
Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts,
and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in
the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
(as you can see here, as an example, the first doc I come across)
http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kdebase/kxkb/ln-id2481641.html
If you can find a specific example where this is not the case,
please let me know, and I will sort it out.
The FDL, with the above terms, is the only license currently in use in
KDE, although there are some legacy documents licensed under the GPL.
Before this goes any further, can you please show me where (and why)
debian believes the GFDL *with no invariant sections and no front/back
cover texts* is a non-free license?
For the record, relicensing most of our documentation will be
impossible. There are several people with stated objections to using
the GPL for documentation, many people we have no way of contacting,
and a couple who are no longer alive, which makes them fairly
difficult to contact.
-- Lauri Watts <lauri@kde.org> (KDE)
Of course, we answered to his questions about the issues of GFDL and the
possibility to use a BSD-style license for *new* documentation.
Though, the last part of his mail is the one that has to be understood
fully : relicensing of the KDE documentation is just *not humanly
possible*. And since the licensing terms allow us to chose any version
of the GFDL >= 1.1, I still hope that the transparent and DRM problems
could be solved in a later version.
> I am <-> that short of seconding dato's proposal, but I believe that
> Debian is also in a position to make the world a better place by
> asking upstreams to rethink. Or am I being completely naïve here?
Well, it's true that we could make some upstreams rethink, but it's also
a fact that KDE, GNOME, or such projects won't be able to do such an
effort. And taking that documentation away, may make the world a worse
place for users that need that documentation.
And please, I don't want to see answers saying that the documentation
can be put in non-free, because, due the the debian policy, `kde`
meta-package (same is true for gnome) beeing in main, cannot depend
upon the non free kde docs (since that would make it live in contrib,
which is IMHO not an option). So that means that unaware users won't
have the docs installed when the 'apt-get install kde' (or aptitude
install gnome, or dselect whatever).
Given the fact that I really think that users that would need
applications manuals the most, are often the one that are the most
unaware of debian packaging considerations, we would just have a lot of
users, desperately pushing their [F1] key, without seeing anything
coming.
While the Invariant parts *is* really problematic, the DRM and
transparent copies things are really a small detail, compared to the
suffering of the user that desperately try to configure his browser to
use the god**m proxy without the doc ``that the debian guru didn't
packaged because after all it's on the net''. Of course I'm
exaggerating, but really .. what is simpler ? hitting [F1] (or Help ->
Contents) ? or trying to find the fscking upstream page of a project
that have the brilliant idea to be named after an english word, so that
google won't be able to help us to find that fscking page before the
23094th result ?
you can also read about it in my recent blog post about it [1]
[1] http://blog.madism.org/index.php/2006/01/12/48-gfdl-the-license-that-sks
--
·O· Pierre Habouzit
··O madcoder@debian.org
OOO http://www.madism.org
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