David Lawyer (dave@lafn.org)
Wed, 26 Jan 2000 20:35:10 -0800
On Tue, Jan 25, 2000 at 08:42:08PM -0500, Paul M. Foster wrote:
> The whole point of any license along this line needs to be to protect the
> consumer. For the most part no one cares whether you copy or sell their
> man/info pages or whatever. However, everyone would like to be sure that
> if they're looking at the documentation for something, that it does
> accurately represent the product it's documenting. That means you don't
> want it indiscriminately altered by someone else. Imagine Microsoft
> getting into this market and "polluting" the Linux documentation with
> "doctored" man pages. So if you're going to alter the docs, you have to
> get permission from the copyright holder or maintainer.
First, the scenario of Microsoft distorting free documents is
unrealistic. If they got caught doing this they would get in much
more trouble than they are already in. There is however the problem
of someone doing a poor job of modifying it. An example would be
where an editor for a publishing Co. who knows little about the
subject edits the work before publishing and makes some mistakes.
I've seen this happen.
At the same time, free documents sometimes becomes unmaintained. The
author may become ill (or even die), not have time to work on it
anymore, enter a new field of endeavor, etc. But if the license
doesn't give permission for others to modify it, then it's bad for
consumers. A point made by Stallman was for the case where someone
modified some software and thus had an immediate need to modify its
documentation without having time to contact the copyright owner.
Thus for documentation to be truly free, I think that anyone must
ultimately have the right to modify it if there is a significant need
to do so (such as it not being adequately maintained). Stallman goes
further than this and would give anyone the right to modify it,
period. One advantage of Stallman's position is that it's simple to
put into a license. How would one determine if there is a
"significant need"?
What I propose as an alternative is to require that anyone who
modifies a document and then allows it to be distributed would need to
do the following: email a notice (or copy) of the modification to the
email address of the copyright owner as given in the latest version of
the document. It would also be suggested that the modifier should
make contact with the copyright owner (usually the author) prior to
any significant modifications. It's very desirable that the author
and the modifier cooperate. It might be the case that the author is
about to release a new versions that would make the proposed
modification unnecessary. Perhaps the author would agree to proofread
the modified version, etc.
There's also a significant need for a single license for technical
documentation even if that means compromising some on what one thinks
a license should contain.
-- David Lawyer
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Thu Jan 27 2000 - 03:59:28 EST