[Bug-gnubg] The gnubg manual and GFDL

[Russ Allbery]

I hate sending mail like this, since I know the last thing anyone wants to
worry about are legal licensing issues, but unfortunately the details are
important.

When making new Debian packages for 0.14.3, I discovered that the gnubg
manual is covered under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.1.
Unfortunately, works covered under that license cannot be redistributed by
Debian, which means that I had to remove the manual from the packages
uploaded to the Debian archive.  :/  That's really unfortunate for users,
many of whom likely would want to be able to read the manual off-line.

Would it be possible to dual-license the manual under the GPL or another
free software license, or otherwise change the terms of the license, so
that it can be included in Debian under the terms of that license?

For more information on the GFDL, the problems with that license, and the
reasons why Debian cannot distribute works under that license, see:

    <http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.html>

Removing all works in Debian covered by the GFDL (at least unless it is
modified by the FSF to fix the problems described in the web page above)
is a requirement for the next stable release of Debian, so I expect GNU
maintainers will be receiving a lot of mail along these lines in the
coming weeks and months.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>