Dear Jaromil,

thanks for sharing that. This also reminds me of having to put together
a message explaining the documentation team's proposal for the licensing
scheme of Devuan's docs and send it to this list. I'll try to get that
done ASAP. For now, I've tried to comment to the best of my knowledge below.

Am 22.06.2018 um 23:07 schrieb Jaromil:

[...]

> One interesting conversation we had about manual licensing which is
> very relevant to move forward with our pending task. About the
> licensing he says that, whatever license we choose (GFDL but can also
> be CC) the most important thing is to not repeat the same error that
> Debian does: to not rule out manuals licensed with invariant sections.
> He told me clearly that the reason why Debian cannot include GNU
> manuals is that it does not tolerate any invariant section, not even
> the cover. If we tolerate that manuals can have SOME invariant
> sections, especially for sections covering ethical aspects rather than
> technical ones, then we have a degree of compatibility more than
> Debian in the direction of the GNU project and we can include all the
> GNU manuals.

1. If our final decision will be to use the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license (which
is the documentation team's unanimous recommendation), then our
documentation license will simply say nothing about invariant sections.

2. This would mean that integrating any of the GNU project's
documentation into Devuan's would have to happen without relicensing the
original content, which would – to a certain extent – be possible within
the scheme the documentation team proposes. The reason for this is
obvious: If a piece of documentation containing invariant sections would
be relicensed under CC-BY-SA terms, invariance would be void.

> I strongly recommend we follow RMS' advice here. And now I'm also
> curious about what GNU manuals aren't in Debian, that we can take
> advantage of, wondering if the problem also includes some info pages.

GNU's info pages are kind of different thing as they are not Devuan's
documentation in a strict sense. If some of those are licensed in a way
that allows for invariant sections and Devuan decides to include them,
then that's that.

> Another major thing that RMS told me is that, if we remove the
> recommendations for non-free sections in the sources.list on the
> website, documentation and those installed, then this is enough of a
> condition for Devuan to be 100% free, in addition to the usual cleanup
> and linux-libre kernel. He clearly told me that he'd like it to apply
> for 100% free and in general to be closer to the GNU project.

As long as removing such recommendations (which, AFAIK, Devuan doesn't
make) does not mean hiding the availability of non-free software or
making it especially hard to install in any way, I don't have anything
against that.

> As a minor comment when I mentioned about support Hurd he also told me
> that he doesn't sees this as a big priority and rather would like to
> see efforts in moving Devuan closer to 100% free. Obviously to move in
> this direction won't be simple since we include also wifi firmware in
> the installer which frankly is veeery useful and comfortable. but...

Ok, see above then.


Best,

Michael