discuss: Licenses not free. Debian. (was Re: Remote-Serial-Console-HOWTO
Subject:
Licenses not free. Debian. (was Re: Remote-Serial-Console-HOWTO
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
7 Dec 2001 05:19:20 -0000
Message-Id: <20011206211851.C4839@lafn.org>
> On Wed, 5 Dec 2001, David Merrill wrote:
> > I don't think the GFDL is an improvement on the LDPL either. It says
> > very much the same thing. But it *is* a much more widely accepted
> > license and that counts for a lot in practical terms.
On Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 07:44:59AM -0500, Guylhem Aznar wrote:
> Agreed. And we had a big role in the GFDL drafting.
Although we suggested that the Free Software Foundation create a free
license for documentation, I don't think we had mush of a role in
drafting it. I think Richard Stallman did it all. The result was an
overly complex license which failed to stop advertising from creeping
into docs and contained no measures to decrease the distribution of
stale documents.
On Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 07:44:59AM -0500, Guylhem Aznar wrote:
> I have another solution - just posted an "emergency announcement" to
> slashdot, then I will do a mass mailing (spam way) to the authors.
No. I think there is no emergency. I suggest that Debian make no
changes until it becomes clear which docs are not free.
I think that a majority of LDP documents are free in the Debian sense.
A big mistake has been made by claiming that about 1/3 of the docs are
not free. First, the Debian definition of "free" is a lot more
ambiguous and inclusive that the GNU one. The Debian definition became
the definition of "Open Source" which includes stuff that Stallman
claims is not free.
But the main reason for the underestimation of the number of free LDP
docs is that no one has really analyzed the licenses. I'm looking at
the LDP Statistics file and note that 21.8% of docs use LDPL which has
been counted as not free. But LDPL is free unless one puts in the doc
itself the following statement (specified in the LDPL license itself):
LDP authors who want to prevent modification to their document should put
the following statement in their document:
Copyright (c) NNNN by YOUR NAME. This document may be
distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set
forth in the LDP License at <http://sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/LICENSE.html>,
except that this document must not be distributed in modified
form without the author's consent.
How many HOWTOs did this? I used grep and found only 10 that did. I
searched for "modified form" including new-line for whitespace.
Also, what about the ones with no license (22.7%). There was a
statement at one time that said that if no license was included, then it
was licensed under LDPL (or the Copying License which is not free). I
can't seem to find this statement (Does anyone have it ?). The
situation is complicated because LDP in the past has had a few different
licenses with various versions of some of them. No one knows the whole
story on this and my searching the Web with Google in the past didn't
help much.
David Lawyer
On Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 07:44:59AM -0500, Guylhem Aznar wrote:
> David (M), could you please provide me a list of their names and email by
> email? I will do a first mailing with the given email then a second one
> with the email I find on google while looking for their names.
>
> If some of you can take a part of the list that'd be faster.
