Re: License FAQs

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Feb 21, 2004 at 08:17:28AM -0500, georgina o. economou wrote:
> ?One thing that would be helpfull clarifying would be : do you consider >documentation as software or not. I know there is a bunch of people who >consider everything that comes in digital form as software, while other don't.
> 
> >So either way, it would be nice to add this clarification to the place where ?>you speak about artwork.

Please, fix your email client to something who know how to quote. Most
of your email is seen as only garbage by most people.
> 
> That's a valid point about the FDL and documentation. Even CreativeCommons recommends the FDL: ( http://creativecommons.org/learn/licenses/ )

No, this is not the problem. What i was hinting at is that, the
documentation being or not being software is a quite controversial
subject in the licencing issue actually discussed, and actually one in
which debian is quite in conflict with the FSF, but let's not enter in
that. So, may point was asking, since you don't consider artwork as
software with regard to the acknowledgement, what is your position on
documentation. Let's say a linux distribution distributes a piece of
documentation and provides third party aknowledgement for it, do they
have to add a XFree86 aknowelgement notice along side it, or not, even
if the piece of documentation is totally unrelated, maybe being a book
shipped on the same CD as X, or whatever. 

A simple clarification of in which category XFree86 places
documentation, along the lines of your clarification on artwork,
probably cited there because of the OpenBSD CD distribution, or
something such, don't remember exactly who it was, would help clarify
that doubt for me.

> _If you are interested in licensing software documentation or other supporting text for a piece of code, we recommend the GNU Free Documentation License._

Please don't. The GFDL is in general considered non DFSG free by the
debian-legal people. Because of the invariant sections i think, but i am
not interested in this in any way, and the clarification above would
stop us from being involved in any of the ongoing flamewars and disputes
currently raging about documentation.

> I am not sure how the Board considers documentation.  I know that our website is copyrighted and must be reproduced in full with attribution and such.  I think that this license is close in spirit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/1.0/ but then I could be utterly wrong.  I don't make decisions, I do interpretations.  
> 
> I'll cc the Board and let them know of of the issue and then make the appropriate changes.  Thanks for the catch.

The issue involved here is not the same, but please cc the board about
my clarifications here.

Friendly,

Sven Luther
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