On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 10:45:59AM -0500, Paul W. Frields wrote:
I know Spot has a number of IRL pressures going on, so let me see if
I
can help. Documentation source of this kind that is nonmodifiable
does not meet Fedora licensing guidelines, and cannot be included in
the distribution.
There might be a (somewhat ugly and unproductive) argument to be made
that we don't technically need to strip out the docs source itself
because the distribution in the SRPM only is unmodified and in an
electronic form similar to that used by Sun. But that would dodge the
fact that just making those docs available in the SRPM, even unbuilt
in the binary RPM, gives them a false appearance of acceptability when
they are in fact non-free.
I'd recommend stripping them out of the tarball using the methods
shown in the packaging guidelines, and then including your own
%{_docdir}/%{name}-%{version}/README-docs.Fedora indicating the
licensing of the docs is nonfree, and including a web address for the
official docs.
Couldn't Sun just as well protect the sanctity of their official
documentation by tying their requirements to the use of the MySQL
trademarks, so that if someone wanted/needed to alter the docs for
some reason, they were required to relinquish use of those trademarks?
I think that would allow them to be more fully freed and then we could
include them in the Fedora repository.
Spot, Richard, if you see any place above where I'm offbase, please
jump in.
Looking at this more closely, I am in agreement with Paul. The
documentation should be removed from the source tarball as it does not
meet Fedora legal guidelines (which apply to source as well as binary
distribution). This is clear because the MySQL documentation license
is more restrictive even than the Open Publication License with
"options". See:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#Documentation_Licenses
--
Richard E. Fontana
Red Hat, Inc.