I am asking to figure out what policies you have regarding packaging and distributing arbitrary text content:
We (CrossWire Bible Society) produce a programme library and a bunch of frontends for Bible study etc. (libsword, gnomesword, bibletime etc) We also have a huge bunch of e-book modules with texts, images etc of varying licences in our repository for free distribution. Other people have similar collections of e-book modules fitting to our software. Some sell them, most distribute their stuff freely with licenses ranging from entirely free to restricted to personal use or whatever in between. Some is supposed to be user editable. The format of the ebooks is zipped and indexed and chooped up OSIS XML, adapted to the specific use, but is essentially open. 2 different implementations exist to read them and more could join. All our frontends use usually a module manager to deal with such content - similar to gutenbrowser downloading texts from Project Gutenberg, which will interact with these. I am in conflict with a packager who wants to package these modules, considering them not content a la ebooks, but some core data necessary to run the programme akin to firefox plugins or CPAN etc, instead of seeing them similar to PDFs or ebooks for Gutenberg - you would not distribute a couple of choice PDFs to keep evince company or select default Gutenberg books for every Debian user to read. He claims Debian policy supporting his stance. I looked through the Policy book and could not find anything regarding his views. Following his views will lead in my view to breakage of our module installer and also could lead to breakage of the Debian packaging system (user editable content). Could you please enlighten me? Thanks Peter -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
