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Re: [Groff] GPL or FDL


From: walter harms
Subject: Re: [Groff] GPL or FDL
Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2013 10:41:45 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; de; rv:1.9.1.16) Gecko/20101125 SUSE/3.0.11 Thunderbird/3.0.11


Am 25.01.2013 00:52, schrieb Colin Watson:
> On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 11:54:43PM +0100, Bernd Warken wrote:
>> This mail goes to the Debian admins. I think that's mostly
>> Colin Watson.
> 
> Exclusively me; I have no co-maintainers of the groff package at
> present.  That said, the General Resolution regarding the GFDL was a
> decision of the whole project.
> 
>>> Von: "Bernd Warken" <address@hidden>
>>>
>>> The groff source tree is usually licensed to GPL.  That is excellent.
>>>
>>> But there are also some documents under the GNU FDL.  This is regarded
>>> as bad by Debian.  Many years ago, Debian made the groff package as
>>> non-free because of the FDL.  So I changed many documentation files in
>>> the groff tree to GPL.
>>>
>>> In 2006, Debian made a voting wether the FDL should become free
>>> software:
>>> http://www.debian.org/vote/2006/vote_001.en.html
>>>
>>> They decided that the FDL without invariant sections would be compatible
>>> with Debian.
>>
>> Can you tell us what Debian says today about using FDL (without
>> invariant sections), especially for GNU projects like groff.
> 
> The most recent vote of the Debian project on the subject was the one
> that you link above.  However, I'm afraid you've misquoted the outcome:
> it says "unmodifiable sections", not merely Invariant Sections.  (The
> full text of the winning option was
> http://www.debian.org/vote/2006/vote_001#amendmenttexta.)  Cover Texts
> are unmodifiable in some contexts and fall under this ruling, and the
> GFDL application to groff.info includes both Front-Cover and Back-Cover
> Texts.  That is explicitly unacceptable to Debian.  If those Cover Texts
> were omitted then we would have no problem.
> 
> However, since the LICENSE file stipulates that all files part of groff
> are licensed under the GPL v3 or later, and I took care to explicitly
> clarify the intent of this with Werner in an e-mail discussion which I
> excerpted in the debian/copyright file in the Debian groff source
> package, this is not currently a practical problem for Debian.  We take
> advantage of the dual-licensing and distribute our groff packages under
> the terms of the GPL, not those of the GFDL.
> 
> At present, I see no need to rock the boat by changing anything; the
> dual-licensing of documentation files seems adequate.
> 


NTL, for some people that is an issue and i am not a friend of double licensing
because that may cause complication.
There is a license for linux man-pages 
[http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/licenses.html]
Is there any reason not to use them ?

re,
 wh




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