To Thorsten and also the Debian packagers for PLplot (and with a CC to Rafael
for whom there is a question below):
I am not a Debian developer or maintainer, but nevertheless I wanted
to comment on this Debian PLplot bug report in my role as long-term
upstream lead developer for both the build system and documentation
generation for this software.
It appears to me this bug report can very simply be answered with an
upstream change to the wording in the Copyright file (also copied to
debian/copyright) to the effect that all files in the source tree
unless specifically mentioned as exceptions in the Copyright file are
licensed under the LGPL. That idea is implied by the current wording
in the Copyright file and also has been well understood by all PLplot
developers since I joined the project in 2000, but it probably needs
to be stated explicitly in our Copyright file so that Debian, Fedora,
etc., packagers will no longer have to deal with any more bug reports
like this one.
@Andrew. Since this change would be completely non-controversial,
please go ahead and commit that wording tweak to the Copyright file
upstream (in your role as one of the core PLplot developers), and I
think in your role as the Debian packager for PLplot, you could apply
this same non-controversial patch to that effect for PLplot-5.10.0.
The rest of this is likely off-topic, but Thorsten seems keen on
this aspect so it might have some relevancy.
In an ideal free software world for at least text files, it is a
well-know "would-be-nice" to include some copyright information. And
clearly such information is lacking in a well-defined subset of the
files in the doc subdirectory of PLplot, and regardless of whether
this issue is relevant to the current bug report or not, I believe
this issue should ultimately be dealt with upstream.
There are currently two general issues of this nature in the
files in the doc tree.
(1) The static man pages (doc/*.1). All of those were written by
Rafael (whom I have CC'd) long ago when he was a co-leader (along with
me) for the generation of PLplot documentation. However, he did not
state the license for these files explicitly in each file at that
time, and I certainly also did not notice that issue until now.
@Rafael (it's been a while we were last in contact so I CC'd you with
two possible e-mail addresses): Do you agree with this summary for the
historical origin of these static man pages, and do you give your
agreement that there should (1a) be an explicit license embedded in those
man page files, and also (1b) present in the pages displayed by the man
application? If so, I know one way to deal with (1a) which is to
prepend
.\"
.\" Copyright (C) 2001-2004 Rafael Laboissiere <raf...@debian.org>
.\"
.\" This program is free software; [plus the remainder of the license
boilerplate]
to each of these man page files. Of course, for (1b) I would use the
.SH COPYRIGHT macro to generate essentially the same wording in the
version displayed by the man application. And, of course, another
sub-issue (1c) is what license to adopt? I believe it is simplest
that for these static man pages we should use the same documentation
license text (adapted from the FreeBSD Documentation License) that the
PLplot team jointly decided (at your urging) was best for embedding in
the docbook files themselves and also in results generated from them.
Do you agree with this choice? If so, I would do the implementation,
and send you the git commit URL so you can see exactly what I have
done. Of course, the final sub-issue (1d) is the Copyright file has
to be tweaked to explain the licensing of these man pages, but I can
deal with that as well.
(2) The doxygen-generated files in doc/doxygen. Those files are
generated by a doxygen command that I configured as part of our build
system (with results copied back from the build tree to source tree
for tarball releases).
I propose to deal with embedded file copyright
and display copyright issues similarly to what I have proposed above
for (1a) through (1d).
The only caveat to that approach that I am aware of is I currently
don't know the ideal way to deal with issue (2a) (so that, e.g, the
html files generated by doxygen have an html embedded comment
concerning their licensing). There may be a way to implement that
with appropriate doxygen configuration, but if not I can always fall
back to using a sed script. There is a documented way to configure
doxygen to deal with issue (2b) (so that, e.g., html browsers of the
html files display the copyright information). For issue (2c) I plan
to use the same license wording for doxygen generated results as we
currently use for the docbook source files and results, and
appropriate tweaks to the Copyright file (issue 2d) are trivial.
To summarize, I think immediately answering this bug report with a
non-controversial tweak to the Copyright file should be trivial, and
in addition for upstream (and possibly to help answer the bug report
if relevant) I propose both embedded and display licensing for the man
pages following what is done for docbook using that slightly modified
BSD documentation license (subject to Rafael's agreement as author of
those man pages) and also for the doxygen-generated files.
Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin
Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).
Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________
Linux-powered Science
__________________________
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