James Carlson wrote:
Bonnie Corwin writes:
Is there any plan to clean up the eratz advertising that is currenting
in the man pages?
This is not advertising. It is attribution and/or verbatim use of
third-party man pages.
Remember that man pages are also source files. When we use third-party
man pages or take information from third-party sources, we must
explicitly cite the attribution in/for those sources. That's what
you're seeing in these kinds of pages.
I was referring to having _Sun_ insert random licensing goop from the
underlying software into the man page, not preserving pass-through
pages.
I agree (obviously) that where we ship somebody else's written
materials (including man pages), we need to preserve this sort of
information. It's much less clear to me whether Sun-written man pages
ought to have that sort of licensing/disclaimer language just because
the source itself does.
The other problem is that the license of the binary isn't the same as
the license of the source in some cases.
It gets really tricky when you have libraries that are built from
multiple different source files under different licenses. We have
exactly that case in crypto libs, there are framework things that are
CDDL and algorithm implementations under various licenses, so whats the
license of the resulting shared library ? What if the shared lib in
this case is actually just a plugin to a framework do you care ?
For example: libpkcs11 would be all CDDL source code except that the
headers it uses are under an RSA license as part of the PKCS#11 spec.
However thats just the framework and doesn't do any real crypto on its
own, the pkcs11_softtoken plugin is a mix of CDDL under Sun copyright,
BSDlike under RSA copyright, derivative works of BSDlike under RSA
copyright but with all the meat from FIPS standards.
Does knowing all this via a man page actually change anything ?
I think in some cases it might and in others it doesn't.
For example knowing that libreadline is under the GPL rather than the
LGPL or CDDL would be good information, particularly since libtecla is
available as an alternative set of functionality.
--
Darren J Moffat
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