O/H Shaun McCance έγραψε: > On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 11:42 +0200, Alexander Shopov wrote: >>> I am neither a Debian developer nor a Debian user. >> Neither am I. >> >>> Although >>> I often try out various distributions, just to see how Gnome >>> looks across the board, >> As I am the committer of the Bulgarian Gnome translation team, I' ve had >> to hunt down one or two bugs/quirks in Debian to improve the experience >> of Bulgarian users. >> >>> I've been considering a change of license since before Debian >>> first raised their FDL concerns, and I've been strongly in >>> favor of a change since before Debian's recent ultimatum. >> My practical issues for a license change is that the Bulgarian >> translation team has translated the 2.6 Gnome Manual and updated some >> sections to the new versions. The translations have not been committed >> to Gnome CVS due to both my lack of time and my inability to understand >> how exactly to convert our version which was generated via a Wiki to a >> version that could be committed back to the CVS. >> >> I am not in favor of having to retranslate something of the same size or >> have to think of ways to relicense translations. >> >> I am fine with not having this translation appear in Windows Vista and I >> am similarly fine with having it in the non-free section of Debian. > > Danilo and I both put a lot of work into making our documentation > translatable with PO files, because that's what the translation > teams wanted. If that's not an adequate solution, then people > need to tell me. > > Converting to DocBook from a Wiki is nearly impossible. We can > make vaguely passable DocBook, with paragraphs and such. But > DocBook is far more verbose and expressive than any Wiki syntax > I've seen. There's just no way to get all the elements right. > I can't be responsible for every set of tools that every last > person has used for creating documentation. There is a wiki, DocBookWiki, that saves the text files as DocBook XML and supports the most common tags, http://doc-book.sourceforge.net/homepage/ At this page you can test with the Albanian constitution (first demo site). The u/p is editor/editor. Currently it appears that DocBookWiki is a one-man job; nevertheless Dashamir does a good work with regular releases. > > I am not going to screw over every writer and every translator > by insisting that the entirety of our documentation stack be > rewritten from scratch. Right now, we are considering changing > licenses. There are many factors to be weighed, including the > amount of writer and translator effort involved. Let's not get > worked up about a problem that doesn't exist. We will do this > right. > >>> Debian's primary objections are the quirky language around >>> the DRM and transparent copy stuff, as well as the usage of >>> invariant sections. >> Debian is not a single entity - it is comprised of its developers and >> not everyone agrees that there are in fact such issues. Thus - I would >> not accept your statement as valid. >> More formally - what you are saying has not been voted by Debian and is >> not their official position yet. Let us not give strength to one of >> their internal groups by identifying the objections of some individuals >> with the whole society of Debian. > > Fine, but it was you who referred to "the Debian hypocrites". > There are *individuals* in Debian who oppose the GFDL because > they believe it's non-free. And there are *individuals* in > Debian who support and maintain the non-free repositories. > Are they the same people? If not, I fail to see any how you > can accuse anybody of hypocrisy. > >> As we both are not Debian developers - it is not up to us and this is >> not the mail list for such discussions. My concern is that the internal >> Debian turmoils do not overflow over to Gnome documentation. >> >>> My issues with the FDL are more with its requirements with >>> respect to revision history and such. >> I am not a specialist in these issues. I will try to get more >> information on this. >> >>> Furthermore, with the long-term goal of having pluggable >>> help files, it won't even be immediately clear where one >>> document ends and another begins. Using the FDL, we'll >>> have to start maintaining revision history on a per-topic >>> basis, and Yelp will have to provide all sorts of mumbo >>> jumbo to allow documents to be compliant. >> Are not all manuals versioned in CVS? Are there no commit logs? But I >> might be mistaken, I will read more on this. > > It's not sufficient. The FDL demands that this information > be visible on the title page of the document. CVS version > information isn't even in the source tarballs, let alone > binary packages or installations. > > Furthermore, for non-printed works, "title page" has a very > peculiar definition in the FDL: > > For works in formats which do not have any title page as > such, "Title Page" means the text near the most prominent > appearance of the work's title, preceding the beginning of > the body of the text. > > People have complained elsewhere that Norm's stylesheets put > all this crap right at the top of the index page (by default, > at least), making you sift through it all before you can read > a document. And I've pointed out that my stylesheets put it > all on a separate page, prominently linked. From this passage, > it's pretty clear that Yelp is preventing documents from being > fully compliant with the FDL. > > In fact, there's absolutely no way a DocBook document can > guarantee its compliance with the FDL, given how much leeway > processing applications have with DocBook. For instance: > > Include, immediately after the copyright notices, a > license notice giving the public permission to use the > Modified Version under the terms of this License, in > the form shown in the Addendum below. > > Authors can put this information in the articleinfo or > bookinfo element in their DocBook, but they can't ensure > that it will be rendered "immediately after the copyright > notices". This is <legalnotice></legalnotice> and it comes after the copyright statement.
The TLDP (www.tldp.org) is using heavily the GFDL and they have a Guide to Authors with template documents, at http://www.tldp.org/LDP/LDP-Author-Guide/ Just to make sure, we (well, you :-) are the owners of the docs, so we are not talking about being sued by someone. >>> What we need is a simple copyleft license that does not >>> impose undue restrictions on modification. Basically, >>> anything beyond maintaining visible contributor credits >>> is just too much. It would also be nice to have built-in >>> provisions for allowing reuse of code samples in contexts >>> outside the documentation. >> Is there a consensus for such a license to be GFDL compatible? > > In what way? Let's postulate the GDL, the Gnome Documentation > License, just so we have a named something to talk about. There > is no way we can allow FDL content inside of the GDL, because > the FDL simply doesn't allow it. We could, certainly, allow > GDL content to be used inside FDL, much like the LGPL allows > you to "escalate" the license to GPL. > > There's no consensus on anything right now. But if people feel > such a clause is important, then we can incorporate it. This > isn't a unilateral dictate from the Fearless Leader. It's all > about the community. I feel that since there are no maniac previous contributors of GNOME documentation out in the wild, we can focus now on writing the documents. I feel we are not ready to jump to a new license. The format that looks more suitable for the type of documentation for GNOME is DITA, which needs some time to mature. Simos
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