Re: [Groff] GPL or FDL

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 11:54:43PM +0100, Bernd Warken wrote:
> This mail goes to the Debian admins. I think that's mostly
> Colin Watson.

Exclusively me; I have no co-maintainers of the groff package at
present.  That said, the General Resolution regarding the GFDL was a
decision of the whole project.

> > Von: "Bernd Warken" <address@hidden>
> >
> > The groff source tree is usually licensed to GPL.  That is excellent.
> > 
> > But there are also some documents under the GNU FDL.  This is regarded
> > as bad by Debian.  Many years ago, Debian made the groff package as
> > non-free because of the FDL.  So I changed many documentation files in
> > the groff tree to GPL.
> > 
> > In 2006, Debian made a voting wether the FDL should become free
> > software:
> > http://www.debian.org/vote/2006/vote_001.en.html
> >
> > They decided that the FDL without invariant sections would be compatible
> > with Debian.
> 
> Can you tell us what Debian says today about using FDL (without
> invariant sections), especially for GNU projects like groff.

The most recent vote of the Debian project on the subject was the one
that you link above.  However, I'm afraid you've misquoted the outcome:
it says "unmodifiable sections", not merely Invariant Sections.  (The
full text of the winning option was
http://www.debian.org/vote/2006/vote_001#amendmenttexta.)  Cover Texts
are unmodifiable in some contexts and fall under this ruling, and the
GFDL application to groff.info includes both Front-Cover and Back-Cover
Texts.  That is explicitly unacceptable to Debian.  If those Cover Texts
were omitted then we would have no problem.

However, since the LICENSE file stipulates that all files part of groff
are licensed under the GPL v3 or later, and I took care to explicitly
clarify the intent of this with Werner in an e-mail discussion which I
excerpted in the debian/copyright file in the Debian groff source
package, this is not currently a practical problem for Debian.  We take
advantage of the dual-licensing and distribute our groff packages under
the terms of the GPL, not those of the GFDL.

At present, I see no need to rock the boat by changing anything; the
dual-licensing of documentation files seems adequate.

Regards,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden