POLL: Should Debian remove all GNU FDL-licensed documentation?

From: Brian Nelson (pyro_at_debian.org)
Date: 04/14/05

  • Next message: Colin Ingram: "Re: POLL: Should Debian remove all GNU FDL-licensed documentation?" 
    Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2005 20:49:38 -0700
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org

    It seems that after sarge is released, Debian developers are planning to
    declare the GNU Free Documentation License non-free. This means that
    all FDL documents currently in main will be either removed from the
    archive altogether or moved into the non-free archive. Since putting
    documentation in non-free requires a creation and maintenance of a new
    and separate source package, I believe most of the documentation will be
    removed completely. Only the most popular documents, or those with
    maintainers willing to maintain them will appear in non-free.

    Affected documents include virtually all documentation released by the
    FSF, including:

    * The various Emacs manuals
    * The GDB manual
    * The GCC manual
    * The glibc manual
    * The GNU make manual
    and many others...

    The three major releases for the GFDL being declared non-free are:

    * Invariant Sections
    * The "DRM" restriction
    * Transparent and Opaque copies

    Invariant sections are "secondary sections" that must not contain
    anything that could fall directly within the document's overall subject.
    They cannot be modified or removed from the document. Most FDL
    documents do not contain invariant sections--I only count 6 on my
    system, though 5 of them are listed above.

    The "DRM" restriction refers to the FDL clause that disallows "technical
    measures to obstruct or control" reading and copying. This is intended
    to prevent the use of DRM on FDL documents, but can be interpreted to
    mean that you can't use FDL on encrypted filesystems (though this is not
    the intent of the writers of the FDL).

    I honestly don't understand the problem with the "Transparent and Opaque
    copies", so I won't try to summarize that here. You may find a
    discussion of it in the position statement link below.

    You may find the full text of the FDL here:

      http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html

    And a draft Debian position statement here:

      http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml

    And now for the questions:

    1. Is it acceptable for Debian to permanently remove most FDL documents
    so that they are no longer available on Debian mirrors or on Debian CDs?

    2. Is it acceptable if all FDL documents were moved to non-free so that
    they could still be downloaded from Debian mirrors? Note that they
    still would not appear on most Debian CDs.

    3. Should Debian allow documents without invariant sections in main, and
    only remove/move-to-non-free those with invariant sections?

    4. Should Debian modify the Social Contract and/or Debian Free Software
    Guidelines[1] to allow all FDL documents to remain in the main archive
    and appear on Debian CDs?

      [1] http://www.debian.org/social_contract

    5. Is Debian making a big out of a minor issue? Should Debian be
    focusing more on creating a usable operating system and less on worrying
    about licensing issues?

    Please restrict your answers to "Yes", "No", or "Uhhhh I dunno". 

    -- 
Society is never going to make any progress until we all learn to
pretend to like each other.
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  • Next message: Colin Ingram: "Re: POLL: Should Debian remove all GNU FDL-licensed documentation?"

    Relevant Pages

    • Re: POLL: Should Debian remove all GNU FDL-licensed documentation?
      ... > It seems that after sarge is released, Debian developers are planning to ... > archive altogether or moved into the non-free archive. ... > * The various Emacs manuals ... > to prevent the use of DRM on FDL documents, ...
      (Debian-User)
    • Re: POLL: Should Debian remove all GNU FDL-licensed documentation?
      ... > It seems that after sarge is released, Debian developers are planning to ... > archive altogether or moved into the non-free archive. ... > to prevent the use of DRM on FDL documents, ... Many of these manuals are essentials to use Debian. ...
      (Debian-User)
    • Re: POLL: Should Debian remove all GNU FDL-licensed documentation?
      ... Is it acceptable for Debian to permanently remove most FDL documents ... so that they are no longer available on Debian mirrors or on Debian CDs? ... Ans: yes ...
      (Debian-User)
    • Re: POLL: Should Debian remove all GNU FDL-licensed documentation?
      ... accepting answers for another day or two before posting the results. ... Is it acceptable for Debian to permanently remove most FDL documents ... > so that they are no longer available on Debian mirrors or on Debian CDs? ...
      (Debian-User)
    • Re: distributions: UBUNTU vs DEBIAN
      ... No, but the driver and module source are in non-free, and this page: ... commands, and take less than 7 minutes (I just did it while writing this ... Mepis is Debian based so there's nothing there that Debian couldn't do if it ... To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ...
      (Debian-User)