Re: Modification of reference material
Hi,
On Sun, Apr 11, 1999 at 09:23:23PM +0000, Arnoud 'Galactus' Engelfriet wrote:
> The problem is that we don't want modified versions of the reference
> materials floating around. We've had some bad experiences with people who
> inserted their own ad banners, or even modified the text to "correct" things,
> but unfortunately got it wrong. The negative feedback then came back to us.
I understand your concerns.
> I've looked at the debian license, but it only seems to cover programs, not
> documentation like this. Is there a need to make reference materials also
> "free" in the sense of the license? If so, that would mean that Debian
> couldn't for example include a local mirror of the RFC documents. I can
> understand this requirement for manpages and such, since the modifications to
> the source could mean a modification to the documentation, but for a
> standalone reference document?
There is no real consensus about this among the Debian developers. I want to
encourage you to comply with the DFSG even for references, eg, documents
which are not bound to a particular software. The reason is that your
reference (although I don't know what reference we talk about in this case)
can lead to better documentation. As an example, we would really like to
have a "free" version of the POSIX standard, so we could use it for
documenting the system and the glibc library etc.
RMS suggested in such case, it would be a reasonable requirement for
derivative works (and adding banners and such IS creating a derived work in
my book) to do one or more of the following:
+ change the name.
+ remove a non-technical introductory chapter, section or paragraph.
+ clearly document which changes were made.
> The renaming requirement wouldn't solve this problem, I think. All the files
> are clearly marked as WDG material, with hyperlinks to our site, so the
> casual reader wouldn't notice the difference between the original and a
> modified version just by looking at the filename.
Yes, this is true. On the other hand, if you want to make it DFSG free,
there is always the possibility of misuse. This is mostly self correcting,
because the Free Software community is very aware of such cases, and usually
not very happy about it. If, for example, someone would distribute a gcc
which adds a trojan horse to every binary, the community will get very angry
about this, simply not use this version and publish this incident.
The strong point for Free Software is not the legal backing, but the social
movement behind it.
So you probably have to consider how important it is to you that your reference
is distributed in the Debian main distribution (read: is publically available
even for modification and derived works) and loose a bit of control. The
alternative is to keep control and have the reference in the non-free
section of Debian, which makes it available for download and inclusion on
CD's at the vendors discretion.
I believe in Free Software because I think the possibility of people to
contribute and basee their work on mine is outweighing the loss of control.
But this is a decision you have to make for each item again.
Hope this helps a bit,
Marcus
--
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