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The LDP and Debian

Posted by michael on from the documentation-always-a-weak-spot dept.

Guylhem writes: "The former LDP license was the first license used for our documentation. While we are now recommending the GNU FDL and the OPL 1 without options A or B, many documents are still licensed under the LDPL. David Merril, our Collection Coordinator, noticed that the LDPL is "not free" according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. We have to get in touch with the authors as soon as possible or 2/3 of the LDP document collection will be removed from the base Debian distribution because the code freeze is happening in 2 days. Maybe some of the LDP unreachable authors are reading slashdot and could take 1 minute to submit an updated document licensed under the FDL or OPL v1 -A -B ? Another solution is to find volunteers to rewrite from scratch the concerned documents."

3 of 279 comments (clear)

  1. DLP with FOL OK? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    So if I want to write a OPE with the DLP or FOL, under option 2a or 17f of the GRL, will the ODP tell me I'm SOL? I want to make sure that FOE and OAF are OAL, otherwise the project might be APO. Just making sure.

  2. Solaris is better anyway by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    it sure is. Isn't it ?

  3. Re:...or rewrite from scratch by lupercalia · · Score: 4, Funny

    There is a reason for this. It's not arbitrary. DocBook lets us produce multiple outputs from pdf to html to RTF. You can extract OMF from it. It's easily integratable into ScrollKeeper.

    And while we do expect documents in our collection to be in DocBook, preferably, we know DocBook can be challenging to learn. So we use LinuxDoc as the point-of-entry. It is a simple DTD, about as complex as HTML if not simpler. It is not so high a hurdle.

    Also, we provide volunteers to convert your document. You can send it in html or text, we'll convert it, and you maintain it from there. Perhaps you weren't aware of that.

    In short, we do everything we can to make getting involved as easy as possible. You don't see people complaining about having to write kernel code in C, do you? "Drat it, why can't they use Python?" Comparatively, we're pretty easy. ;-)