Hi, Branden, and Michael!
On 9/8/21 6:35 AM, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
Hi, Alex!
I'd like to request a different choice of name for the SPDX license tag
used by the man-pages documents affected by this change. It's my
understanding that there is freedom to make such a choice because the
proposed tag does not yet appear in the SPDX license list[1].
I have a few reasons: (1) the license tag says "Verbatim" which implies
to me that permission to modify the document is excluded--but it is not;
Completely agree!
I never understood why it was called Verbatim, and I even thought that
my understanding of the concept "verbatim" was wrong, because it
contradicted the license contents. I had to re-read it (and google
"verbatim") many times to arrive to the conclusion that the naming and
the contents simply don't match.
(2) with the exception of the paragraph about the kernel and system
libraries being in flux, this license appears identical to what I (and
some folks in Debian) started terming the "traditional GNU documentation
license) about 18 years ago when debate over the GNU FDL was raging[2];
this was in fact the license the GNU project used for most of its
documentation before it promulgated the FDL. As far as I know, this
license text has no earlier provenance; I would appreciate correction on
this point. Thirdly, since that time, the GNU project has christened
the license terms for many of its web pages the "GNU Verbatim Copying
License"[3]. You can perhaps see how this might generate confusion.
Because the warranty-disclaiming third paragraph about the Linux kernel
is unique to the Linux man-pages project and the term "verbatim" implies
too much restriction in my view, I envision a few alternatives.
man-pages-doc
man-pages-document-copyleft
man-pages-copyleft
Any of the above could be further prefixed with "Linux-" to reinforce
the specificity to this project, of course. If pressed for a
preference, I reckon I would pick "Linux-man-pages-copyleft".
I like that name. Less historical, but more precise. Michael?
Acked-by: Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@xxxxxxxxx>
I don't know if the Linux man-pages license has made it into other man
pages, in which case, I would omit the "Linux-" prefix for
compatibility. I guess BSD man pages use the BSD license.
The identifier "Verbatim-man-pages" is already in SPDX, but it is yet
unreleased. They talked about releasing soon, so could you please jump
in there and propose that change to SPDX?:
<https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML/issues/1310#issuecomment-911876593>
BTW, does the "traditional GNU documentation license" have an SPDX
identifier?
I feel that the "VERBATIM" string is similarly misleading, but it's not
presented as an SPDX license tag, and I see that its use is already
well-entrenched. I expected to find something like a sed script in the
man-pages scripts/ directory that manipulated lines matching
'%%%LICENSE_START(' but failed to. Perhaps a convenient new moniker
could be adopted to supersede "VERBATIM" in this context, once the SPDX
tagging initiative is complete?
The SPDX license text doesn't contain the LICENSE_START and LICENSE_END
lines, so if we change the name, there will be no traces of VERBATIM
(apart from the git history, that is).
Cheers,
Alex
Regards,
Branden
--
Alejandro Colomar
Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/
