Eike Lange writes:

On Sat, May 24, 2003 at 12:53:44PM +0200, Matthias Klose wrote:

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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.

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[...] 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.

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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?

did you actually look at the given URL?

What is the correct license in Debian's view?

If I correctly understand, texi and info files without invariant sections would allow Debian to include the docs in the main section.

Matthias

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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?

did you actually look at the given URL?

Yes, but the information is quite disorganized at that URL so it's easy to miss the pertinent facts unless you read closely. I did on my first glance through it.

Could you please give a short line about things we have to do in order to have a Free documentation and fulfill the Debian point of views about this issue.

In the middle of the page is the section that explains the problem:

**** The Problem ~~~~~~~~~~~

The GNU FDL includes a number of conditions, which apply to all modified versions, that disallow modifications. In particular, these are:

* K. For any section Entitled "Acknowledgements" or "Dedications", Preserve the Title of the section, and preserve in the section all the substance and tone of each of the contributor acknowledgements and/or dedications given therein.

* L. Preserve all the Invariant Sections of the Document, unaltered in their text and in their titles. Section numbers or the equivalent are not considered part of the section titles.

However, modifiability is a fundamental requirement of the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which state:

3. Derived Works

The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

As such, we cannot accept works that include "Invariant Sections" and similar unmodifiable components into our distribution, which unfortunately includes a number of current manuals for GNU software. ****

Interesting issue, how to preserve credit without stopping modifications. Quite amusing since whenever I've released free source code, my license has often been simply "You can do anything you want with it as long as you give me credit", and while this is *much* freer than GPL, it retains what the FDL is trying to accomplish (although since it's not specific about modifications, so it might still pass the Debian Freeness test).

At 3:53 PM +0200 24/5/03, Eike Lange wrote:

But GPL, LGPL and GNU-FDL _are_ invariant ["...but changing is not allowed"]

This is actually irrelevant - the license that the allows the various things to be copied at all includes provision for the license to be included. Modifying the license as written would have no actual effect except to confuse people since the stuff is all distributed under specific published licenses and those license specify the requirements - distributing without including those licenses in unmodified form would be a violation of the license.

Enjoy, Peter.

At 8:07 AM +0200 25/5/03, Frank Heckenbach wrote:

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Interesting issue, how to preserve credit without stopping modifications. Quite amusing since whenever I've released free source code, my license has often been simply "You can do anything you want with it as long as you give me credit", and while this is *much* freer than GPL, it retains what the FDL is trying to accomplish (although since it's not specific about modifications, so it might still pass the Debian Freeness test).

But that's a very vague formulation. If GPC had something like this, someone could probably sell a slightly modified version, claiming that it's his work and mentioning somewhere in the small-print that it contains some contributions by (insert names) ...

Yes, as I said, my normal free source license is "*much* freer than GPL".

But the issue Matthias is interested in is the freeness of lack thereof of the FDL and whether it's an issue for the GPC documentation with regards to Debian usage. that's not an issue I can answer, hopefully others know the answer.

Enjoy, Peter.

Matthias Klose wrote:

Peter N Lewis writes:

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But the issue Matthias is interested in is the freeness of lack thereof of the FDL and whether it's an issue for the GPC documentation with regards to Debian usage. that's not an issue I can answer, hopefully others know the answer.

well, the original question was, which "invariant section" statement the GPC manual pages have.

It doesn't have any, and Eike will clarify this in the future.

So the man page isn't a big problem. But the GPC manual seems to be IIUYC. It currently has the following invariant sections:

``GNU General Public License'', ``GNU Lesser General Public License'', ``GNU Free Documentation License'',

As Eike mentioned, these licenses are invariant by definition. So is it a problem for Debian to include them as invariant sections? (If so, we could probably leave them out from the list of invariant sections, which wouldn't in fact make any difference, since these licenses by itself disallow their modification.)

``The GNU Project'', ``The GNU Manifesto'' and ``Funding Free Software'',

I guess these are the problematic ones, right? If so, would it help if we "dual-license" the manual with and without them? I.e., you can use the manual as before, or you can completely omit these sections (which Debian could then do).

another issue are the "Front-Cover Texts" and the "Back-Cover Texts".

There are no Back-Cover Texts. The Front-Cover Text is just ``The GNU Pascal Manual''.

I've never seen these texts from GPC in, i.e. a GNU/Linux distribution, so this is not only Debian related ...

I've never seen a GNU/Linux distribution in which the GPC documentation accounts for a quarter or more (paragraph 7, FDL).

Frank

Matthias Klose wrote:

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``The GNU Project'', ``The GNU Manifesto'' and ``Funding Free Software'',

I guess these are the problematic ones, right? If so, would it help if we "dual-license" the manual with and without them? I.e., you can use the manual as before, or you can completely omit these sections (which Debian could then do).

Yes, a dual license would help.

So I suggest the following change. Note, this is just a draft yet. If it's sufficient for you, we need the agreement of all recent (i.e., since the change from LGPL to FDL) contributors to the documentation. I'd have to check, but that's at least Peter N Lewis, Mirsad Todorovac, Eike and me.

If that's done, just set DEBIANLY_CORRECT. (In addition, you might want to remove gnu.texi and remove its reference from the Makefile, if you also have to omit it in source distributions.)

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I've never seen these texts from GPC in, i.e. a GNU/Linux distribution, so this is not only Debian related ...

I've never seen a GNU/Linux distribution in which the GPC documentation accounts for a quarter or more (paragraph 7, FDL).

maybe not the GPC documentation, I never added all the documentation under the FDL and compared it to the complete documentation.

: 1. [...] The "Document", below, refers to any such manual or work.

(And not the entirety of several such works.)

: 7. [...] if the Document is less than one quarter of the entire : aggregate [...]

So AFAIUI, a single package would have to be 1/4.

Frank

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

Nope, the original authors can do so too.

It depends on who owns the copyright, FSF or the original authors. In many cases the author assigned copyright to the FSF and than can no longer change the license unless they send a formal letter to the FSF asking for their own copy of the software or document to do with as they see fit. And FSF still owns the copyright on the FSF copy.

--Phil

At 7:26 PM -0700 26/5/03, Phil Nelson wrote:

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Nope, the original authors can do so too.

It depends on who owns the copyright, FSF or the original authors. In many cases the author assigned copyright to the FSF and than can no longer change the license unless they send a formal letter to the FSF asking for their own copy of the software or document to do with as they see fit. And FSF still owns the copyright on the FSF copy.

This was discussed a while back and I just wanted to give a summary of my experiences.

First, I was given an assignment license from the FSF that would assign my rights to the FSF, but then they would grant back rights to me to do as I wish with my changes. As such, I would be able to release the changes under a different license (more or less restrictive) as I chose.

However I declined to sign this as it had some further requirements that put potential work on me in the future (namely, I might be required to do things to implement the spirit of the agreement, make reports to the FSF, plus agreements to take on the FSF's liability in any changes to the code). I see no reason that I should sign such an agreement, putting potential extra risk or limits on myself in order to allow the FSF more freedom to prosecute people for breaches of the GNU license.

After that, I learned of the public domain license they had instead, and got a copy of that. Put simply, it allowed me to simply disclaim all copyright interests in my changes and affirm that I have no other IP interests and wont undermine the program in the future, and that the changes are my own work. Since I'm happy to place my changes to GPC in the public domain, this was fine by me and I've signed this and sent it back to them. Since I've disclaimed my copyrights to my changes, no one owns them and anyone can do anything they want with them, including me under a different license if I feel so inclined.

Enjoy, Peter.