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List:       kde-licensing
Subject:    Re: Translation / Documentation licensing
From:       Alex Merry <kde () randomguy3 ! me ! uk>
Date:       2010-03-27 17:13:17
Message-ID: 201003271713.26918.kde () randomguy3 ! me ! uk
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On Friday 12 March 2010 16:45:00 Burkhard Lück wrote:
> 1) License of translations of docs
> The Licensing_Policy says in section 6:
> "...Translations of text from other files must be licenced under one of the
> terms in sections 4 or 5."
> Sections 4 and 5 name LGPL/BSD/MIT/X11/GPL but no FDL which is the license
> to be used for documentation.
> 
> FDL says in 2.9 TRANSLATION:
> "Translation is considered a kind of modification...", so the translation
> of a kde documentation afaik has to be FDL as well.
> 
> This seems to be contradicting to the text in Licensing_Policy section 6.

Yes.  I think section 6 is intended to address translation of API 
documentation.

I think we should restrict section 6 to just deal with source files (note I've 
also added a hint of what section 6 is intended to deal with):

Translations of text (such as API documentation) from the files described in 
section 4 must be licenced under one of the terms in sections 4. Translations 
of text from other source files must be licenced under one of the terms in 
sections 4 or 5.

We could also explicitly say in section 8 that translations must also come 
under the FDL.


> 2) Using Documentation licensed under FDL with a Invariant Section.
> 
> Recently I got in contact with the 'Doku-Wichtl' from opensuse
> (http://en.opensuse.org/Documentation_Team) about a collaboration for
> writing/exchanging KDE documentation.
> 
> The opensuse docu team has eg written a KDE Quick Start and a KDE User
> Guide and some more docs for KDE 4; see
> http://www.novell.com/documentation/opensuse112/
> 
> Legal section of these docs says:
> "Copyright © 2006-2009 Novell, Inc.
> Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under
> the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later
> version published by the Free Software Foundation; with the Invariant
> Section being this copyright notice and license. ..."
> 
> Afaik the copyright notice of the original documentation has to be included
> in the modified documentation anyway and the modified doc must be FDL, so
> this Invariant Section seems to be superfluous, but IANAL...
> 
> Or is there something in this Invariant Section I have overlooked?

Erm... how on earth did that get into their copyright statement?  The FDL 
actively prohibits anything other than a "Secondary Section" being designated 
Invariant, and a Secondary Section "is a named appendix or a front-matter 
section of the document that deals exclusively with the relationship of the 
publishers or authors of the Document to the Document's overall subject..."

Now, I guess that you could read "front-matter" to include copyright notices, 
but that is clearly not what is intended.  Especially as in section 4 it says:
"...provided that you release the Modified Version under precisely this 
License..." and "you must... Preserve all the copyright notices of the 
Document".

> 
> Licensing_Policy has in section 8:
> "Documentation must be licensed under one of the following terms:
> FDL versions 1.2 as listed in kdelibs/COPYING.DOC or later versions with no
> Invariant Sections..."
> 
> Does that mean a modified version of the opensuse docs with the mentioned
> Invariant Section can't be used in KDE?

Well, I'm not even sure Novell's licensing header is valid, since they have 
designated as an Invariant Section something that (by my reading) is 
prohibited by the FDL from being an Invariant Section.

Basically, Novell need to fix their licensing declaration, then everything 
should be fine and dandy.

Alex



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