Bug#384019: manual-copyright clarification

Stefano Zacchiroli zack at debian.org
Tue Aug 22 23:00:39 UTC 2006


On Tue, Aug 22, 2006 at 09:52:14PM +0200, Bram Moolenaar wrote:
> The name "Open Publication License" is right, the URL was wrong.

Could you please correct the URL then? I guess the following is the
correct one:

  http://opencontent.org/openpub/

> The book by Steve Oualline uses this license, I used it for the Vim
> documentation to avoid any trouble.  Otherwise I don't care much what
> license is used exactly.

So we have quite a problem in Debian now, regarding the Vim Manual :-(
The Open Publication License is not a free license according to the
Debian Free Software Guidelines [1]. This has been discussed on the
debian-legal mailing list, the conclusion and the discussions are
available in the Debian wiki [2].

The bug report Cc-ed is a bug raising this issue [3].

As the things are now, we will be forced to remove the vim manual from
the free section of the Debian archive and move it to non-free. Users
will then be able to install vim with the default debian configuration,
but wont be able to do it without adding the non-free archives to their
repository configuration. I fear that this would also mean that vim wont
be the standard vi-like editor in the debian distribution :-((

Do you think it is possible to relicense the manual under a different
license? (The best possible is usually the same that applies to the
source code of the program itself). How many parts are taken from
Oualline's book? Is it possible to rewrite them? We are of course
willing to help in that, but maybe we are luckily enough that no more
parts took from the book are still in the help ...

Many thanks in advance,
Cheers.

[1] http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses#head-add2e754f3a906f07e4ff1c050a2548f04ef4cbe
[3] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=384019

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- Computer Science PhD student @ Uny Bologna, Italy
zack@{cs.unibo.it,debian.org,bononia.it} -%- http://www.bononia.it/zack/
If there's any real truth it's that the entire multidimensional infinity
of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. -!-
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