discuss: Migration process of the existing documents to Wiki
Subject:
Re: [discuss] Migration process of the existing documents to Wiki
From:
Frank Lichtenheld ####@####.####
Date:
24 Jul 2008 22:51:52 +0100
Message-Id: <20080724215142.GS11882@mail-vs.djpig.de>
On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 09:46:03AM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Frank Lichtenheld ####@####.####
> > Just in case someone finds it useful, for the Debian LDP package I have
> > a license overview at http://pkg-doc-linux.alioth.debian.org/
> Frank, I do respect your work, but just for clarification: Are those
> licence classifications your opinions as Debian LDP package maintainer?
> That would be a (functionally) important opinion, but I'm just hoping
> people realise that there is no such thing as a canonical list of
> DFSG-free licences, only a bunch of Web pages posted by various
> Debian-related people, some of them posting to debian-legal and some
> not, that do not in any way speak for the Debian Project as a whole (but
> are often misread as being such -- including by other Debian maintainers).
>
> In my own view, I think a number of legitimately DFSG-free licences have
> been wrongly classified as non-free by certain vocal debian-legal
> posters, e.g., by people on debian-legal who did not correctly read and
> interpret the trademark licensing clause in CC Attribution-ShareAlike
> 2.0, when that was discussed on that mailing list.
It is true that there is no canonical list of DFSG-free licenses, not
for lack of me trying, BTW, but by the opinion of several members of
debian-legal that a license in itself can't be judged without the
context of a work it applies, too. Whether that is a reasonable
opinion should probably not discussed here.
OTOH, there is a canonical body in Debian for making final decisions
on license matters and that is the FTP team. My classification tries
to reflect their policies regarding licensing. For the example you
mention that means that CC << 3.0 is classified as non-free, and CC 3.0
is classified as free (apart from the obvious non-free variants like
nc). For the more important case (in documents affected) of the GFDL
this means that GFDL licensed documents are free if they use no
Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
Gruesse,
--
Frank Lichtenheld ####@####.####
www: http://www.djpig.de/
