Eike Lange wrote:
On Sat, May 24, 2003 at 12:53:44PM +0200, Matthias Klose wrote:
On The debian-legal mailing list there currently is a major discussion about the "freeness" of the "GNU Free Documentation License". You may want to look at the archives yourself, one point to start is http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200304/msg00307.html
Comes to my TODO list.
[...] but in the man page I only find: COPYING Copyright (c) 1997-2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 version published by the Free Software Foundation. A copy of the GFDL comes as a texinfo document along with the GPC manual. In contrast with copying-fdl.texi, there is no mentioning of the "Invariant Sections":
Thank you for the bug-report, I'll fix this as soon as possible.
Please clarify the copyright of the man page. I'll have to remove the info and html docs from the Debian main section (maybe somebody volunteers to repackage them to the non-free section), but to keep at least the manual pages in the package I'd like to see the license of the manual pages be clarified.
The Man-Page is Free, GPC's info files are Free and the compiler itself is Free. So please do not move those things into "non-free". Do you (the Debian team) really think, our documentation is propritary? What is the correct license in Debian's view?
It would probably be sufficient to license it under the GNU FDL "with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts". When using the GNU FDL, you should *say* this if you don't want any of these. It's these things which cause the primary problems with freeness. (There's some argument over other clauses but these are the places where there is consensus about problems.)
Sadly, only the FSF high-ups can change the license status of an existing document under FSF copyright.
In a later message, Eike said:
But GPL, LGPL and GNU-FDL _are_ invariant ["...but changing is not allowed"]
This is true. But this is not the primary problem with GNU FDL "Invariant Sections". GNU FDL "Invariant Sections" cannot be *removed* under any circumstances whatsoever.
(Example: suppose a derivative of GPC was licensed entirely under GPL, with no LGPL. The derivative manual would *still* have to include the LGPL as an "Invariant Section" even though it was now irrelevant, since it didn't apply to any of the program.)
Just remove the wording "invariant section" for unchangable sections does not seem to do the job, does it?
See, this is why it in fact does do the job. :-) "Invariant Section" in the GNU FDL means "non-removable" as well as "unchangable", and it's the "non-removable" part which Debian is certain is non-free.
--Nathanael