Martin Schulze | 23 Feb 12:07
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Warning: man-pages became non-free

Hi,

this is just a warning for those of you who shipt Free Software that
is not contaminated by non-free components.  The man-pages project
became inherently non-free as of version 1.65 by the inclusion of
POSIX manpages.  It's license (not included in the package, though)
permits redistribution but no modifications, which is not compatible
with any idea of Free Software.

Please see <http://linuxpr.com/releases/6599.html> for an official
announcement of The Open Group and IEEE.

For Debian I'm stripping the non-free POSIX components off of man-pages
and repackage it.  Thank got the manpages are collected in three
directories distinct from the rest of man-pages, so stripping is not
too hard.

There's also a little thread on the debian-legal list, where I hoped
that people would disagree with me.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0402/msg00190.html

Regards,

	Joey

--

-- 
Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it!  -- Mark Twain

Martin Schulze | 14 Mar 09:10
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Re: Warning: man-pages became non-free

Hi,

I've been approached by Richard Stallman discussing the future
maintenance of (GNU/)Linux manpages, who asked me to forward a
question to this list:

"Who would like to distribute the free man pages without the non-free
ones?  If you are interested in this, would you let me know?"
(rms@...)

Rest of my old mail quoted for background information:

Martin Schulze wrote:
> this is just a warning for those of you who shipt Free Software that
> is not contaminated by non-free components.  The man-pages project
> became inherently non-free as of version 1.65 by the inclusion of
> POSIX manpages.  It's license (not included in the package, though)
> permits redistribution but no modifications, which is not compatible
> with any idea of Free Software.
> 
> Please see <http://linuxpr.com/releases/6599.html> for an official
> announcement of The Open Group and IEEE.
> 
> For Debian I'm stripping the non-free POSIX components off of man-pages
> and repackage it.  Thank got the manpages are collected in three
> directories distinct from the rest of man-pages, so stripping is not
> too hard.
> 
> There's also a little thread on the debian-legal list, where I hoped
> that people would disagree with me.
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