New license request: Linux-man-pages-copyleft

[alejandro-colomar]

Hi,

I'm trying to migrate the Linux man-pages to use SPDX markings and be REUSE compliant. However, the most used license in the man-pages project, the "verbatim" license, doesn't appear in the list.

See https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/licenses.html.

Could you please add it to the list?

Thanks,

Alex

[seabass-labrax]

@alejandro-colomar, welcome to SPDX!

We'd need some more information about the license to see if it fulfils the License Inclusion Principles for the SPDX License List. Please could you include in this GitHub issue the same information that is asked for in our online tools form? That would be very much appreciated; thanks! :)

You can, in this case, omit the 'example project URLs' field - this request is unusual in that such examples of use can be readily found by zcat-ing the contents of /usr/share/man!

[alejandro-colomar]

@alejandro-colomar, welcome to SPDX!

:-)

We'd need some more information about the license to see if it fulfils the License Inclusion Principles for the SPDX License List. Please could you include in this GitHub issue the same information that is asked for in our online tools form? That would be very much appreciated; thanks! :)

License's full name: Verbatim
Short identifier: Verbatim
Source / URL: https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/licenses.html
OSI status: I don't know; probably not submitted. DFSG-compatible (no doubt man-pages ships with Debian), although not listed on Debian's website either.
Standard license header: None; the full text of the license is used.
License text:

.\" Copyright (c) <year>, <copyright holder>
.\" 
.\" %%%LICENSE_START(VERBATIM)
.\" Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this
.\" manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are
.\" preserved on all copies.
.\"
.\" Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of
.\" this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that
.\" the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of
.\" a permission notice identical to this one.
.\"
.\" Since the Linux kernel and libraries are constantly changing, this
.\" manual page may be incorrect or out-of-date.  The author(s) assume.
.\" no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting.
.\" from the use of the information contained herein.  The author(s) may.
.\" not have taken the same level of care in the production of this.
.\" manual, which is licensed free of charge, as they might when working.
.\" professionally.
.\"
.\" Formatted or processed versions of this manual, if unaccompanied by
.\" the source, must acknowledge the copyright and authors of this work.
.\" %%%LICENSE_END

Who is the license author or license steward? I don't know. Probably some previous maintainer of the man-pages. Michael Kerrisk mtk.manpages@gmail.com probably has more information about this.

Example project URL: https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/

You can, in this case, omit the 'example project URLs' field - this request is unusual in that such examples of use can be readily found by zcat-ing the contents of /usr/share/man!

:-} Anyway, I added it for completeness.

[swinslow]

Doing a quick inclusion-principles review on this one:

Definitive factors: meets all of these. Looks like the first two sentences are very close to Abstyles and part of Latex2e, but the remainder of the license is different so this can't really use either of those IDs.

Other factors:

1. Yes, I'd say this meets the Free Cultural Works definition. Permits redistribution, modifying, etc., with a strong copyleft/sharealike-style requirement for modified versions.
2. Yes, generally usable by anyone
3. Actual, substantial use: very yes, it seems 🙂
4. N/A, since meets Free Cultural Works definition.
5. Not clear re: steward, but for short permission notices like this I think there frequently might not be a "license steward" the same way there is for more formal, titled licenses.

Given all of that, I'm a +1 to add this to the License List.

= = = = =

Two specific comments about how it gets added:

1. For the license ID, I might be inclined to go with something like Verbatim-man-pages instead of just Verbatim -- since this one seems pretty specific to manual pages (and refers to them in the license text). I don't feel super-strongly about this, but I think it might be a good idea here.
2. For the actual license text that gets added to the list: from a pedantic SPDX view, I'm noticing those extra periods at the end-of-line for the third paragraph -- see below, stripping the prefix characters, but leaving those in place:

Since the Linux kernel and libraries are constantly changing, this
manual page may be incorrect or out-of-date.  The author(s) assume.
no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting.
from the use of the information contained herein.  The author(s) may.
not have taken the same level of care in the production of this.
manual, which is licensed free of charge, as they might when working.
professionally.

To me it looks like those stray periods might have been inadvertent (since they don't show up in the other paragraphs).

Assuming this is approved to add to the License List, I might suggest leaving those stray periods in the XML, but tagging them as <optional></optional>. That way, license checkers that are pedantic about punctuation will handle them correctly, and those that aren't will disregard them anyway.

[alejandro-colomar]

Re: Verbatim-man-pages: yes, thay identifier seems reasonable to me.

Re: nonsensical periods: I think that's a typo in the license example text in the website, and they are not present in the license texts in the actual manual pages, so you can safely remove them.

If you need me to resend the text, as present in actual pages (without the periods) I can do that

[seabass-labrax]

@swinslow, due to the factors that you described above, I am also strongly in favour of adding this to the License List :)

Regarding the bizarre punctuation, it turns out that some of the man pages do indeed contain these trailing characters. Admittedly, it is only about 0.4% of them, but I can provide random.7 as an example!

[alejandro-colomar]

Regarding the bizarre punctuation, it turns out that some of the man pages do indeed contain these trailing characters. Admittedly, it is only about 0.4% of them, but I can provide random.7 as an example!

What a random coincidence :)
I hope the authors of those few pages won't complain if we modify their license text by removing some random periods!

[jlovejoy]

+1 to add, so I think that makes it official

@alejandro-colomar - might you feel comfortable preparing a PR as per https://github.com/spdx/license-list-XML/blob/master/DOCS/new-license-workflow.md
:)

[alejandro-colomar]

Done :)

[swinslow]

Thank you @alejandro-colomar! Merged #1319

@seabass-labrax will add some additional formatting in a follow-up, so I'm keeping this issue open for the moment.

[alejandro-colomar]

We are discussing in the linux-man@ mailing list about renaming this license tag to Linux-man-pages-copyleft (or some other similar proposals), since the term "Verbatim" doesn't represent very well the license text.

See https://lore.kernel.org/linux-man/8b513d06-3e9e-3d2f-6217-07bf2fa3765c@gmail.com/T/#m375aa0483debfd97a481e95dee57c4059cae9cb7.

[jlovejoy]

hi all - do I understand that we have already merged this, but we are also still kind of waiting to have a final decision on a name (given the above link)? In which case, should we have merged already? We certainly don't want it to look like short ids are changing even if it's not yet in an official release

[alejandro-colomar]

The proposal for changing names came long after merging :/

However, if you release with this name, no problem, we'll stick with it forever, and I'll reject the renaming proposal.

[jlovejoy]

right... well, it's merged, but not part of an official release yet (3.15) and thus, not published on website yet

@swinslow, @goneall - what do you think about changing an SPDX id in this period? (given we try to not change them)

[goneall]

what do you think about changing an SPDX id in this period? (given we try to not change them)

@jlovejoy really good question. In my opinion, it would be OK to change it before a release. Once released, however, it should never change.

There may be some who are watching the license-list-data repo and using the data as it merged that my get tripped up by this, however. My personal opinion is that you should not depend on the data until it is released.

@swinslow curious about your thoughts.

[pombredanne]

@swinslow, @goneall - what do you think about changing an SPDX id in this period? (given we try to not change them)

@jlovejoy I am all for it until released. That's why there are releases.

And in particular, why using a man-pages references in this id? I reckon it was seen in man pages, but the license references only a "manual" not man pages which would be a specific format. It feels weird to reference a format in the id of a license. Verbatim-manual would be a better id IMHO.

[g-branden-robinson]

I've submitted a PR for the rename.

#1336

[g-branden-robinson]

@swinslow, @goneall - what do you think about changing an SPDX id in this period? (given we try to not change them)

@jlovejoy I am all for it until released. That's why there are releases.

And in particular, why using a man-pages references in this id? I reckon it was seen in man pages, but the license references only a "manual" not man pages which would be a specific format. It feels weird to reference a format in the id of a license. Verbatim-manual would be a better id IMHO.

"man-pages" refers to the name of the originating project; it's not a reference to the documentation format per se, although the project has, to date, restricted its mission to the production of man pages. "Verbatim" is a poor choice of terminology for reasons Alex and I discussed on the linux-man mailing list (there's a URL in my PR). Briefly, it is difficult for a person to infer the right to distribute modified forms of a work from the word "verbatim", particularly in a copyright law context when that permission is reserved by default.

Another reason for this license name to be particular to the Linux man-pages project is that the quasi-warranty-disclaimer paragraph has language specific to "the Linux kernel and libraries". This is not going to be appropriate language for many other projects.

[swinslow]

@goneall @jlovejoy Apologies for slow response. Reading through this, yes, I'm +1 with the idea that we'll be open to changing IDs as long as a merged ID has not yet been in a release, or appeared on the public license list page.

Once it's in a release and lands there, I think that makes sense as the point in time when our position of "we'll deprecate but we never ever remove IDs" kicks in.

Looks like the CI hasn't run yet in #1336, I'm starting it now.

[swinslow]

Discussed name change on 2021-10-28 legal team call, agreed to change ID to Linux-man-pages-copyleft; merged #1336. Thanks all!