[Gllug] LDP licence and Debian.

[Nix]

On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, William Palfreman stated:
> Why has Debian just threatened to exclude LDP licensed documentation?  
> Is it that it is really non-free, or is it Debian people putting their
> constitutionalism in front of actual freedom license-wise?

The slashdot post had a link to the LDP page
<http://www.linuxdoc.org/ldpwn/ldpwn-2001-12-04.html> which makes it
clear that the LDP people think there is a licensing problem.

See
<http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200112/msg00201.html>
and the thread proceeding from there. (This stuff is all publically
available, and very easy to find; why did you think the GLLUG list, of
all places, would be a better information source than the Debian list
archives?)

This applies to an ancient license only; in
<http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200112/msg00065.html>
the LDP coordinator says

: A lot of our documents are under some form of the "LDP License"
: which was a badly written hack thingie dating way back. It exists in
: multiple versions with different requirements. But it wasn't
: versioned. :-/

I think it's clear that the LDPL is generally regarded as sucky.

Especially the `requires approval by author' stuff in it is a
killer. What happens if the author is dead or uncontactable? Why, then
you can't modify the text at all.

Doesn't seem very free to me, and `constitutionalism' doesn't come into
it. I know of very few cases of Debian `putting constitutionalism in
front of actual freedom', as the constitution (or, more to the point,
the DFSG) isn't totally unchangeable; if it turned out broken, there'd
be a vote to fix it. Methinks the Slashdot paranoids have been having
their usual FUD-fest, and you've been misled by it.

>                                                             In my
> desperate search for a well-maintained 2.2 based distro I have been
> using Debian a bit recently.  It does seem very professional and I will

s/professional/amateur/, as it's done for the love of it :)

> probably switch over to it when I am a bit more familiar with the
> packaging.  Can the LDP licence really be so bad though?  I've never
> heard of this objection before.

The LDP license in question has been dead for some time.

Note
<http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200112/msg00120.html>;
the relicense (of 60%+ of the LDP tree, ouch) proceeds apace.

-- 
`The situation is completely under control. All of them were killed.'
     --- Alim Razim, for the Northern Alliance, demonstrating fine
         command of traditional Afghan prisoner control techniques.

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