[kde-doc-english] Debian, KDE and the GFDL problem

[Lauri Watts]

On Saturday 07 January 2006 11:31, Brad Hards wrote:
> On Thursday 05 January 2006 19:47 pm, Isaac Clerencia wrote:
> > 2) Convince manual authors to a) relicense their works under the GPL, or
> >    b) double-license them under both the GFDL and GPL.
>
> You may not relicense or double-license any of the documentation I have
> contributed to.
>
> There are no invariant sections in my stuff, and I think that makes it a
> free license. You are welcome to disagree. You are more than welcome not to
> provide my documentation (or put it into non-free, whatever).

There are no invariant sections in *any* KDE documentation.   There are no 
Front-Cover texts, and there are no Back-Cover texts. *ALL* our documentation 
that uses the FDL is licensed under the following terms:

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under 
the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later 
version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant 
Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of 
the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation 
License".

(as you can see here, as an example, the first doc I come across)
http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kdebase/kxkb/ln-id2481641.html

If you can find a specific example where this is not the case, please let me 
know, and I will sort it out.

The FDL, with the above terms, is the only license currently in use in KDE, 
although there are some legacy documents licensed under the GPL. 

Before this goes any further, can you please show me where (and why) debian 
believes the GFDL *with no invariant sections and no front/back cover texts* 
is a non-free license?

For the record, relicensing most of our documentation will be impossible.  
There are several people with stated objections to using the GPL for 
documentation, many people we have no way of contacting, and a couple who are 
no longer alive, which makes them fairly difficult to contact.

Regards,
-- 
Lauri Watts
KDE Documentation: http://docs.kde.org
KDE on FreeBSD: http://freebsd.kde.org