On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 06:28:25PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote: > The following licence is used on a number of LDP documents: > > Please freely copy and distribute (sell or give away) this document in any > format. It's requested that corrections and/or comments be fowarded to the > document maintainer. You may create a derivative work and distribute it > provided that you: > > 1. Send your derivative work (in the most suitable format such as sgml) to > the > LDP (Linux Documentation Project) or the like for posting on the > Internet. > If not the LDP, then let the LDP know where it is available. > > 2. License the derivative work with this same license or use GPL. Include a > copyright notice and at least a pointer to the license used. > > 3. Give due credit to previous authors and major contributors. > > If you're considering making a derived work other than a translation, it's > requested that you discuss your plans with the current maintainer. > > The Debian legal guys usually say that requirements for people making > modifications to contact the author or similar are non-free, since it > means that people in remote locations disconnected from the Internet > can't distribute modified versions (the "desert island" test). > > However, clause 2 says that derivative works may be licensed under the > GPL. May I consider this mail as the required notification to the LDP > that Debian will be distributing trivial (i.e. unchanged) derivative > works of all HOWTOs and mini-HOWTOs using this licence from > http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/doc-linux/, and distribute them > all under the terms of the GPL instead? The original licence will be > included in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright, the standard location for > copyright notices in Debian packages, within the packages provided > there.
The above and this mail are notice that the Debian doc-linux-html and doc-linux-text packages will adopt this practice as of the next release, since the "send your derivative work to ..." clause is a problem for us and the option to relicense under the GPL removes that problem. I think it's reasonable to assume that authors don't object to this; if they do then I wonder why they're using a licence that says "... or use GPL". :-) Regards, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]