On Fri, 2 Sep 2016 00:15:11 +0100 Ian Jackson wrote: [...] > Making a modified version of a scientific paper like this > one is neither useful, nor, unless especial care is taken, ethical.
I respectfully, but strongly, disagree. DFSG-free scientific papers (distributed while making source available) may be of great value to the scientific community and to the general public. There are countless kinds of modification/partial-reuse/mixing that would serve the best interest of scientific progress and/or scientific education. And even scenarios where (part of) a DFSG-free scientific paper could be turned into something completely different from a paper... As a Free Software supporter, I am convinced that none of these activities should be considered unethical, as long as no misrepresentation is going on (that is to say: as long as the derived work is clearly described as such, proper credit is given to the authors of the original paper, and the derived work is not passed off as the original paper). [...] > But Debian has taken the view that even documents like this one must > be fully free, [...] Thank goodness Debian has taken such view! My personal opinion on the case at hand follows. The Debian FTP Masters apparently consider works licensed under the terms of CC Attribution v3.0 as acceptable for the main archive. I personally disagree with them [1][2], but that's another story... [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2010/01/msg00084.html [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/07/msg00124.html The paper PDF is apparently generated from LaTeX code (which, along with the source for the images, is the source form, unless it is in its turn generated from some other format), but the source is not made available. Shipping a source-less PDF document in the (source and/or binary) Debian package would make the package unfit for the main archive. The PDF file should be shipped in the binary package, while shipping the corresponding source in the source package. The PDF file should be preferably regenerated at package build time. Otherwise, if the authors of the paper cannot be persuaded to provide the source, then the PDF file should be dropped from both the source package and the binary package. I hope this clarifies my own take on the subject. Bye. -- http://www.inventati.org/frx/ There's not a second to spare! To the laboratory! ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == CA01 1147 9CD2 EFDF FB82 3925 3E1C 27E1 1F69 BFFE
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