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License terms of ICE manual?
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Hi,
As some of you already know, I'm packaging ZeroC Ice and ZeroC IceE for Debian GNU/Linux. Most of the packages are already accepted but I am having some troubles with the documentation.
When I was looking for the licensing terms of the ICE manual (DP with Ice) I found the following statement in the web page:
Since I did not find any other licensing wording in the manual itself I understood that it was released under the GPL. On the other side Debian policy requires that "preferred form for modification" is also distributed along the source package but I guess it is not available for download.
At this point there are a couple of legal issues knocking on my head. First and most important question is:
Is the "DP with Ice" book really covered by the GPL?
If not, there are a few other consequences that I should care about. As part of the Debian policy compliance requirements I had to create a man page for every executable in the Ice packages. I hand-edited those man pages adding a bit of roff macros to texts taken from the Ice manual by just copy and paste from a PDF viewer.
This raises my concerns: If the manual is not GPL then there are also legal issues on the distribution of those man pages. Am I right? Should I write clean-room man pages from the source code of the executables? Would it be possible to release these or similar man pages under a DFSG compliant license?
And if the manual may be distributed under the GPL then, why arent't the sources available for download?
Thank you very much for your help,
F. Moya
As some of you already know, I'm packaging ZeroC Ice and ZeroC IceE for Debian GNU/Linux. Most of the packages are already accepted but I am having some troubles with the documentation.
When I was looking for the licensing terms of the ICE manual (DP with Ice) I found the following statement in the web page:
All downloads are released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Since I did not find any other licensing wording in the manual itself I understood that it was released under the GPL. On the other side Debian policy requires that "preferred form for modification" is also distributed along the source package but I guess it is not available for download.
At this point there are a couple of legal issues knocking on my head. First and most important question is:
Is the "DP with Ice" book really covered by the GPL?
If not, there are a few other consequences that I should care about. As part of the Debian policy compliance requirements I had to create a man page for every executable in the Ice packages. I hand-edited those man pages adding a bit of roff macros to texts taken from the Ice manual by just copy and paste from a PDF viewer.
This raises my concerns: If the manual is not GPL then there are also legal issues on the distribution of those man pages. Am I right? Should I write clean-room man pages from the source code of the executables? Would it be possible to release these or similar man pages under a DFSG compliant license?
And if the manual may be distributed under the GPL then, why arent't the sources available for download?
Thank you very much for your help,
F. Moya
0
Comments
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Sorry for the late response.
We cannot make the source for our documentation available, because the build system is non-trivial, and requires several proprietary tools. We also don't want to make the documentation sources available. Our documentation is free for everyone to download and copy and use, but we do not want modified versions of our documentation to be distributed. Therefore a license such as the GFDL is not an option for us. However, you can copy parts of the documentation and transform them into manual pages if you like.0 -
Thanks for your clarifications. I'll try to package the documentation in the non-free section but it would be easier if the licensing terms were explicit somewhere in the document itself.
From your concerns I would suggest Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives .
Regards,
F. Moya0 -
fmoya wrote:Thanks for your clarifications. I'll try to package the documentation in the non-free section but it would be easier if the licensing terms were explicit somewhere in the document itself.
I agree, adding this is on our todo list.fmoya wrote:From your concerns I would suggest Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives .
Regards,
F. Moya
Thank you very much for the suggestion, I will have a look at this license agreement.0
