Re: [ode] Comments on the OSR


Wade Hampton (whampton@staffnet.com)
Fri, 28 Jan 2000 10:46:25 -0500


David Lawyer wrote:
>
> 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.
Changes by editors is a very realistic scenario. Changes by MS could
happen if they ever decided to try to subvert open source technology
and documentation (e.g., try to introduce very subtle bugs in the
kernel TCP/IP stack or such). A version of a security document that
made your box insecure by mis-typing a command could make the community
look rather bad (and would be fairly easiy for a company like MS with
their $$$$ to accomplish).

> At the same time, free documents sometimes becomes unmaintained. [snip]
Agree....
>
> Thus for documentation to be truly free, I think that anyone must
> ultimately have the right to modify it [snip]
> How would one determine if there is a
> "significant need"?
Determining "significant need" would be difficult and most likely
a challenge to the lawyers. The docs should be able to be changed,
but the original author and original content MUST be protected.
For this to work, one must be able to rollback the changes somehow.

The last thing we all need are 5 copies of the same document, maintained
by different folks and containing slightly different text. This is
where a group like LDP would come in and check in docs onto
their server, or similar.
>
> 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.
Maybe have it say something like make a reasonable effort to contact
the original author, but if no response is received within x days....

Also, should require the person that made the changes to keep a copy
of the original for rollback in case there are problems?
>
> 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.
I agree! The license should be an open source standard and should
be registerd (maybe IETF?). If there is one license (or a couple of
related ones), one could reference them, not include the full license
text (back to the previous thread...).

Cheers,

-- 
W. Wade, Hampton  <whampton@staffnet.com>  
Support:  Linux Knowledge Base Organization  http://linuxkb.org/
Linux is stability, performance, flexibility, and overall very fun!
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