Re: SPDX license review requests

[Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com>]

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Hi Branden,

On 5/26/23 16:37, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2023-05-26T16:10:47+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
>> On 5/26/23 15:15, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
>>> I suggest taking a few days to shake out some points (it's going to
>>> be a holiday weekend in the U.S.  anyway, so some engineers may
>>> already be on PTO), and then re-announce the relicensing effort
>>> subsequently.
>>
>> I'll go on trip around Europe for a couple of weeks starting this
>> weekend, so I'll be relatively quiet for some time.  :)
> 
> I'm sure you can guess what I hope is released by the time you return.

I won't hold my breath ;')

> 
>>> I see from your follow-up email that _this_ is the one Fedora
>>> claimed to have a Freeness problem with.  Can we scare up a cite for
>>> which one, exactly, they were referring to?  The concern their
>>> determination causes me is that _none_ of the four license you
>>> present here explicitly grant permission to translate.
>>
>> Sorry, I was already confused with so many threads.  So, there's one
>> more license, not derived from these, but which seems related to GPL.
>> It's the LDP (v1) license.  That's the one that was rejected by
>> Fedora:
>>
>> <https://gitlab.com/fedora/legal/fedora-license-data/-/issues/211>
>>
>> The reason was the prohibition to recommend an info manual.
> 
> Ahhh.  Here it is.
> 
>>> You may modify your copy or copies of the Document or any portion of
>>> it, thus forming a work based on the Document, and copy and
>>> distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1
>>> above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions: [. . .]
>>> c) You must not add notes to the Document implying that the reader
>>> had better read something produced using Texinfo.
> 
> Hah!  That's actually funny to me (and maybe to anyone who's shared a
> discussion thread with Eli Zaretskii).

It definitely is :D

>  But I don't think it belongs in
> a license.

I actually believe jokes belong to licenses.  Otherwise they'd be very
boring to read, and nobody would read them.  I'm joking, but a lot of
truth is said in jest.

> 
>> I confused that thread, with the one about VERBATIM_TWO_PARA, in which
>> you accused it of also being non-free.
>>
>> <https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML/issues/1947#issuecomment-1554695533>
> 
> Well, hang on--I was extrapolating from inadequate information.  I said
> I didn't _know_ if permission to modify implied permission to translate,
> though I have reason to fear it doesn't, and I dropped the IANAL and
> TINLA disclaimers to cover my rear.  SPDX has real copyright lawyers.
> Let them opine.

I don't have much faith in that.  I asked them for advice when switching
to SPDX tags in the project, and didn't get any.

> 
> If the Fedora Project doesn't have a problem with the LaTeX
> 2e/"traditional GNU documentation" license missing its translation
> permission paragraph, then I do not propose that they acquire such a
> problem.

Makes sense.

> 
> But I think if we're going to go to the trouble of a relicensing push,
> we might as well employ all four clauses of LaTeX 2e/tGdl while we're at
> it.

Latex2e only has 3 paragraphs (and each seems to be a clause).

<https://spdx.org/licenses/Latex2e.html>

I think Linux-man-pages-copyleft is fine, and both mtk and aeb seemed to
want to prefer that license for the project.  Jumping to another one
would be very difficult, as we'd need to get the authors of thousands of
pages to an explicit agreement, which I find unlikely to happen.
Jumping to Linux-man-pages-copyleft from other VERBATIM_* variants will
be easier, since there are very few VERBATIM_*-licensed pages.  One less
since today (yesterday, local time).

And Latex2e doesn't have any disclaimers about damages and other stuff.
I don't know if those are implied by the software being FOSS, but it's
probably safer to keep it.

BTW, I just found that there's a "GNU Free Documentation License" (with
many versions and variations), and they don't seem related to Latex2e,
but rather one of those GNU licenses that could be confused with a book.
They use the identifiers of the form GFDL-*.  E.g.:
<https://spdx.org/licenses/GFDL-1.1-invariants-only.html>

I'm not implying they are bad, and I like GPL, but I never really could
read it entirely in one sit.

> 
>> They renamed GPL-2.0 to GPL-2.0-only, AFAIK.
> 
> Ah.  That seems likely to have been of much higher impact.

<https://spdx.org/licenses/#deprecated>

Cheers,
Alex

> 
> Regards,
> Branden

-- 
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
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