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egallesio / STklos

STklos Scheme
http://stklos.net
GNU General Public License v2.0
69 stars 17 forks source link

What is the license of the documentation? #118

Open jpellegrini opened 3 years ago

jpellegrini commented 3 years ago

Hello! What is the license of STklos' documentation? (the autogenerated docs, the manpages, README, etc) The Debian packaging team wants to know. :)

egallesio commented 3 years ago

Hi!

That is an excellent question. For the parts I wrote I don't really care (GFGL?) but large parts of it come from R5RS or R7RS, where the copyright is not really clear....

jpellegrini commented 3 years ago

Hi @egallesio -- did you mean GFDL? Would that be 1.3 "or later"? I'll check the RnRS license status. I am sure this have been sorted out before, because other Schemes have been packaged for Debian, and I think lots of them do include parts of RnRS.

egallesio commented 3 years ago

Yep GFDL (or any other license). If GFDL, don't know the diffrence between versions.

lassik commented 3 years ago

I'll check the RnRS license status. I am sure this have been sorted out before, because other Schemes have been packaged for Debian, and I think lots of them do include parts of RnRS.

From the R5RS PDF:

We intend this report to belong to the entire Scheme community, and so we grant permission to copy it in whole or in part without fee. In particular, we encourage implementors of Scheme to use this report as a starting point for manuals and other documentation, modifying it as necessary.

lassik commented 3 years ago

Not sure if there is a more formal license somewhere. The TeX files are collected here: https://github.com/schemedoc/rnrs-metadata There may be other files in the original tar archives that contain those TeX files that are not included in that repo.

jpellegrini commented 3 years ago

Hi @lassik . Do you think the statement (we grant permission to copy it in whole or in part without fee) is clear enough? Can it be relicensed under a different license? And if, for example, the STklos manual mixes R5RS with @egallesio 's own text, is it necessary to identify which part is taken from R5RS?

(The same applies to R7RS -- which has the same statement)

lassik commented 3 years ago

We'd best ask @weinholt about that. I'm not well versed in the details of copyright law or Debian policy.

weinholt commented 3 years ago

Whenever this comes up on a Scheme list the answer is something to the effect that you just need to read the paragraph, it says everything you need to know:

We intend this report to belong to the entire Scheme community, and so we grant permission to copy it in whole or in part without fee. In particular, we encourage implementors of Scheme to use this report as a starting point for manuals and other documentation, modifying it as necessary.

Read it as many times as you have to, in particular the part where it says "as a starting point for manuals and other documentation, modifying it as necessary". :) The sticking points of licenses are usually: Can we copy it? (Yes). Can we modify it? (Yes). What do we need to do? (Nothing). Not all licenses are long, and being brief does not make it less of a license.

Here's an example from Kawa: https://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/Manual-License.html.

GFDL is okay for Debian if there are no unmodifiable ("invariant") sections.

lassik commented 3 years ago

I think the confusion is because that paragraph doesn't have a formal name like "GPL" or "BSD". It doesn't have a SPDX-License-Identifier (though perhaps it could?)