To further underline what I have been saying, I object to any of my (currently embarrassingly minor) contributions to the Debian web page to be licensed under the terms of the proposed "Debian Free Documentation License" or any other license which has been specially drafted for the Debian web pages. We should be using existing, widely examined and vetted licenses instead of bothering with writing our own.[1]
If you have further questions about this issue, please e-mail me privately off list so -www can go back to doing more substantiative things. On Sun, 23 Apr 2006, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña wrote: > On Sat, Apr 22, 2006 at 06:40:11AM -0700, Don Armstrong wrote: > > Indeed, neither of the two licenses you've sent are just s/FreeBSD > > Documentation/Debian/g; replacements... each of them have > > contained other changes. > > 1- s/FreeBSD/Debian/ > 2- remove SGML as the sources, since it does not apply to all our > documentation and, moreover, does not apply to the website (sources are > mostly WML) You have effectively removed any definition in the license as to what source code is. > 3- add HTML as an output The license explicitly lists the output forms that can be generated from the source which is definetly suboptimal. > 5- add a reference to translations (could be considered a > "modification" to the source, however they are not in > international IP law) Lets stop here before going any further: There's no such thing as "international IP law". The very term "IP" is in itself a massive confusion of three separate branches of law which differ widely between different jurisdictions. Furthermore, it's definetly not clear that in any of the jursidictions that I'm aware of that a translation would not be subject to the rules of the license that apply to any other form of derivative work. If you know differently, please cite relevant law and/or cases. > 2 and 3 are *technical* changes to notes, they do not affect the > license at all. 2 and 3 quite clearly affect the license. > I don't believe any of these changes introduces any new pitfalls, > quite the contrary, it removes them. > > With an MITed work there should be no confusion at all. > > There is no MITed "work" license, I'm refering to a work licensed under the MIT license. If it's too confusing, you can s/software/work/. > the MIT license explicitly mentions software too. If we can distribute it in Debian, it's software. We use work in place of software to avoid this exactly line of argument, but it should be abundantly clear what software means in this context. > As for GPLv3, I will not get into details, but I rather not use that > license. You cannot use it yet because it does not yet exist in it's final form. That said, if you have a problem with GPLv3, you should be discussing those problems using gplv3.fsf.org so those of us who are on committees can address the issues that you have with the license. [Of course, if your issue is with copyleft licenses in general, there's not much that I'm going to be able to do for you.] Don Armstrong 1: Considering the fact that I've been relatively heavily involved in the committee part of the GPLv3 process, I'd say that I have a relatively reasonable understanding of the amount of work that it takes to fully understand the consequences of a license change which is not altogether grand in it's scope. It's 4 months into the process, and we're still discovering new problems. -- Of course, there are ceases where only a rare individual will have the vision to perceive a system which governs many people's lives; a system which had never before even been recognized as a system; then such people often devote their lives to convincing other people that the system really is there and that it aught to be exited from. -- Douglas R. Hofstadter _Gödel Escher Bach. Eternal Golden Braid_ http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
