discuss: SCO copyright violations on LDP
Subject:
Re: SCO copyright violations on LDP
From:
Colin Watson ####@####.####
Date:
7 Aug 2003 00:15:09 -0000
Message-Id: <20030807001508.GJ6936@riva.ucam.org>
On Wed, Aug 06, 2003 at 05:02:06PM -0700, David Lawyer wrote:
> Regarding LDP documents on SCO's website (inherited from Caldera).
> On Wed, Aug 06, 2003 at 01:25:54PM -0700, Tabatha Marshall wrote:
> > I don't turn soapbox very often, but if it was up to me, I'd ask SCO to
> > remove the LDP documentation from their site completely, or allow them
> > to only provide a link to LDP. I checked the link to the HOWTOs at
> > http://docsrv.caldera.com:8457/en/index.html, and none of them are newer
> > than February 2001. If they're not even going to provide an up to date
> > list of what we have, perhaps the LDP docs should just be removed, and
> > that would be justification enough.
>
> No it's not. You weren't here when I did a search on the Internet for
> one of my HOWTOs and found that the vast majority of them were old
> versions. There were several hundred sites distributing old versions.
> But worse that that, some sites add advertising to them. All this
> misuse of LDP docs could be stopped if the license prohibited this. But
> LDP will not allow such licenses (should this be changed?).
>
> So misuse of LDP docs is rampant and there is nothing we can do about it
> since all the licenses we use allow it. Any license that restricts such
> abuses would be considered by FSF (and Debian) to be non-free. I think
> they need to reconsider this issue.
If the Debian HOWTO packages suddenly carry the requirement that
everybody who installs a web server that happens to export
/usr/share/doc/HOWTO to the world must make sure to have the newest
versions of the packages installed (and perhaps even more than that,
since now and then I don't have time to update the packages for a few
months, and I never got a favourable response to my request to update
the packages in stable), then I will regretfully have to ask for the
packages to be removed from the distribution immediately. I don't think
I can reasonably expect our users to accept that requirement; since text
versions of the HOWTOs are in our standard installation, some of them
may not even have noticed that their web servers are publishing the
collection in the first place!
Sorry to put it so baldly, but it's the way it is from our side. I
really hope the LDP doesn't take this road, as it would be a great
departure from the liberal terms used by kind authors up to now. I do
understand the concern, though. Many documents have some text like "To
read the most recent version of this document, see <link>", which seems
like a pretty good compromise to me? Sysadmins don't suddenly become
legally liable for forgetting to update a web site every now and then,
and readers get a pointer to the newest version which they can follow if
they're interested.
Restricting advertising: dunno. Are terms like "The original author's
(or authors') name(s) may not be used to assert or imply endorsement of
the resulting document without the original author's (or authors')
permission" (LDPL v2.0) or "Neither the name of the University nor the
names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products
derived from this software without specific prior written permission"
(BSD licence) good enough? You could regard adding advertising to a
document as modification.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson ####@####.####
