Bug#207699: Licence conflict within Securing Debian Manual
Package: www.debian.org
Version: 2.95 (june 2003)
Severity: serious
The Securing Debian Manual is GPLv2 overall, but contains a third-party
GFDL inclusion, resulting in licence conflict. Ideal remedy, if
possible, would be if the inclusion's author (Alexandre Ratti) were
willing to dual-license (or grant a licence exception on) that work.
My use of "Severity: serious" derives from my attempt to interpret Debian
Policy section 12.5 (Copyright information):
Every package must be accompanied by a verbatim copy of its copyright
and distribution license...
I figure a problematic copyright notice / distribution licence doesn't
substantively satisfy that "must" directive. If I erred, and this bug
should be "Severity: normal", my apologies.
----- Forwarded message from Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> -----
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 12:52:27 -0500
From: Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org>
To: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com>
Cc: debian-legal@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Licence oddity in Securing Debian Manual (was: Proposed addition to Debian web pages re: GNU FDL)
X-Mailing-List: <debian-legal@lists.debian.org> archive/latest/15210
[Rick, apologies for the CC if you are subscribed to this list.]
On Thu, Aug 28, 2003 at 01:54:31AM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> This reminded me of something I noticed earlier today. The Securing
> Debian Manual at
> http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian-howto/ has in its
> front material the following:
[...]
> Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
> under the terms of the GNU Public License, Version 2 or any later
> version published by the Free Software Foundation. It is distributed in
> the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY.
>
> All well and good, so far. Appendix H of the Manual, in
> http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian-howto/ap-chroot-apache-env.en.html
> , has:
>
> This document is copyright 2002 Alexandre Ratti. It has been released
> under the GNU-FDL 1.2 (GNU Free Documentation Licence) and is included in
> this manual with his explicit permission.
>
> Doesn't that create a licence conflict?
Yes. Even RMS does not posit that the GNU GPL and the GNU FDL are
compatible licenses. They are not miscible in a single work except by a
party with copyright on the complete corpus. That's obviously not the
case here.
Please file a bug against www.debian.org, and feel free to quote this
message.
--
G. Branden Robinson | As people do better, they start
Debian GNU/Linux | voting like Republicans -- unless
branden@debian.org | they have too much education and
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | vote Democratic. -- Karl Rove
----- End forwarded message -----
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