Re: Using the GFDL properly

[Alexander Kirillov <kirillov math sunysb edu>]

I have no intention of starting a flamewar, but let me first say that
as far as I understand, the section "How to use this license..."
legally is not a part of the license - which means that including a
copy of the license with the original document is *not* a requirement of
FDL and that we are free to choose the way we like for including the
license. Of course, we need to think carefully when doing so -
otherwise, as RMS points out, people redistributing the document
will be in trouble (it is a requirement of FDL that a copy be included
with re-distributed doc). 

On the other hand, including the license with *every document* is
unrealistic. Do we really want   100 copies of GDP distributed
with GNOME? 

In my opinion, a reasonable compromise would be: 

 -a to include a copy of FDL with every package distributed with GNOME
  - as a plain text file similar to COPYING. I am not sure if it is
  technically feasible to force the installation not to install it if
  there is already a copy coming from other package - it can lead to
  all kinds of problems, for example when you remove one package whil
  leaving the others.
  
   Note that GDP handbook is not distributed as a GNOME package, so I
   am not sure how this applies to it.

 - include one copy of FDL in DocBook or HTML  format in one of the core GNOME
   packages, e.g.  gnome-core or the forthcoming gnome-user-docs

 - change the wording of the legalinfo to mention that FDL is included
   as a text file in the source of the package, and also for
   convenience provide the link to <help:fdl> (which should bring up
   the DocBook version if the appropriate package is installed)
  
We may also need to revise the section "license" (which discusses the
license of the application in our docs) to include reference to
COPYING file (i.e. GPL). 

Sasha

On Tue, Sep 05, 2000 at 04:40:40PM -0500, Dan Mueth wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 5 Sep 2000, Richard Stallman wrote:
> 
> > One of the requirements of the GFDL is that the manual which is
> > covered by it needs to contain a copy of the GFDL.  A link or
> > reference to a separate copy doesn't qualify.
> > 
> > It looks like handbook/gdp-handbook doesn't contain a copy of the
> > GFDL, just a link to it.  This means people redistributing the
> > material verbatim will in fact be violating the license.  Would you
> > please add a copy of the GFDL to it?  Just copying the contents of our
> > web page into that directory and linking to it would be an easy way.
> > 
> > Using just a link or reference to the license is not reliable; a few years
> > from now, the link could break.
> 
> It seems we have been mis-using the GFDL.  I thought we looked this over
> carefully after GUADEC when we first moved to it, but the current version
> of the license on the FSF's web page clearly states we are supposed to
> include the entire FDL license in each document:
> 
> http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/fdl.html#SEC4
> 
> How should we do this? If I understand things correctly, the issue is that
> we must ship a copy of the GFDL in every package that has a GFDL'd doc.  
> (Is this right?) So I don't think we are allowed to ship one copy of the
> GFDL in gnome-core and have all GNOME docs link to this one version or
> pull it in as an entity.  Could we decide on one place where it gets
> installed and then each package tries to install it there if it is not
> already there?  
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Dan