Follow-up Comment #1, bug #18473 (project freeciv): > The "Copying" heading in the help section is a bit > uninformative. When I first saw it the question was "Copying > what? Where from and where to?". COPYING is the traditional name for the GPL file in GNU software distributions, so presumably that's where the menu item name comes from.
> Thus, an easy way out is to change the "Copying" string into > "License" or "Copyright" to make it more informative. I don't know if the GNU people were trying to make some philosophical point with the "copying" word. FWIW, I can imagine "Copyright" wouldn't sit well with them, given the "copyleft" terminology, but "License" would probably be OK. > On top of that the legalese was not even localized in my > Polish version of Freeciv. That's deliberate -- since it's legalese, the specific words matter. There's no official version of the GPLv2 in a language other than English, AFAIK. (FWIW, there's a unofficial Polish translation here <http://gnu.org.pl/text/licencja-gnu.html> -- found from here <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-translations.html>.) > perhaps we should also add a brief summary (2-4 sentences) > of the GPL before the full text of the license. Such summary > would not be constitutive, it could be translated and it > would be informative for non-English speakers too. Think we'd have to be quite careful about that. The GPL is already relatively condensed -- I don't fancy trying to summarise it further -- and any summary would have to clearly state that it's not legally stating the redistribution terms (and make sure all translations included it accurately), which legalese would bloat the summary. _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <http://gna.org/bugs/?18473> _______________________________________________ Message sent via/by Gna! http://gna.org/ _______________________________________________ Freeciv-dev mailing list Freeciv-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/freeciv-dev
