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New license request: Linux-man-pages-copyleft-var #1959

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adobes1 opened this issue May 3, 2023 · 22 comments · Fixed by #2003
Closed

New license request: Linux-man-pages-copyleft-var #1959

adobes1 opened this issue May 3, 2023 · 22 comments · Fixed by #2003
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@adobes1
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new license/exception: Accepted new license/exception request used in major distro
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3.21

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@adobes1
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adobes1 commented May 3, 2023

1. License Name: Linux man-pages Copyleft Variant
2. Short identifier: Man-pages-copyleft-var
3. License Author or steward: Unknown
4. Comments: This license is used in several Linux man-pages. It is very similar to Linux-man-pages-copyleft.
5. License Request Url: http://tools.spdx.org/app/license_requests/233
6. URL(s): https://github.com/mkerrisk/man-pages/blob/master/man2/set_mempolicy.2#L5-L20
7. OSI Status: Unknown
8. Example Projects: https://github.com/mkerrisk/man-pages
@adobes1
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adobes1 commented May 3, 2023 •
edited

The only difference between this license and Linux-man-pages-copyleft is that this license does not include the following sentece:

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.

Related Fedora issue: https://gitlab.com/fedora/legal/fedora-license-data/-/issues/212

@jlovejoy
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I'd like to hear others thoughts on this - the sentence that is omitted in this variant is kind of informational... could we justify just marking it as optional?

@jlovejoy jlovejoy mentioned this issue May 16, 2023
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@BrianInglis
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BrianInglis commented May 16, 2023 •
edited

Should not even be looking at man7 pages except as possible examples as they are years outdated compared to the current Linux kernel.org pages (or the bleeding edge maintainer pages which feed that).
It might also be worth discussing on the man-pages mailing list, or at least mentioning and referring back with links to these issues, and updating Alex @alejandro-colomar (or possibly just referring to him if he monitors these) on licence name changes to maintain consistency.
He is very responsive especially when man page patches are included. ;^>

@alejandro-colomar
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alejandro-colomar commented May 16, 2023 via email

@BrianInglis
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A quick log analysis confirms the majority of contributors email addresses are from what psl renders as professional commercial orgs:

     50  redhat.com
     29  google.com
     12  suse.com
     10  intel.com
     10  ibm.com
      9  suse.de
      8  suse.cz
      8  fujitsu.com
      7  oracle.com
      5  intel.com
      5  canonical.com
...

whereas the largest number of volunteer contributors 145 have gmail.com addresses.

@jlovejoy
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@BrianInglis - when you say you shouldn't be looking at these man pages b/c they are old... but apparently they are still around and distributed

@adobes1 - I presume you created this request b/c these man-pages are included in Fedora (as per Fedora license policy)?

@jlovejoy jlovejoy added this to the 3.21 milestone May 19, 2023
@BrianInglis
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@BrianInglis - when you say you shouldn't be looking at these man pages b/c they are old... but apparently they are still around and distributed

There are many unmaintained projects, packages, and their websites - see Sourceforge for lots of examples, and those products are still "distributed", like many old and even ancient system and package versions (Linux 2.00 man pages anyone?), even though they may not have been updated nor downloaded for many years (and for software, may contain many serious unfixed security vulnerabilities).
Thus I refer to those man pages as merely providing examples of (possibly outdated, as of next release) licence text.

Those private man pages and related web pages have not been updated since @mkerrisk stopped maintenance two years ago after Linux 5.13 and glibc 2.34, possibly to concentrate on keeping his The Linux Programming Interface (course) book editions up to date to make up for pandemic losses giving online (and private/on premise) training courses in Europe and the Americas (booking a year ahead), conference presentations, and consulting on those topics (those web pages have been updated).

The Linux man pages project had no official maintainer after 5.13 for a ten month period during which time 921 commits had been applied for 6 Linux releases and associated glibc changes.
For comparison, since that release, 672 commits have been applied to date, and @alejandro-colomar has been doing a lot of housekeeping, standardizing, updating man pages to standards and also supporting [gt]roff -man commands, as the [gt]roff and -man maintainer fixes issues and updates macros.
[Of course, one commit could be a patch affecting hundreds of files or lines.]
We are now many releases later preparing for @alejandro-colomar to release Readme Linux man pages 6.05.

As of #1955 and #1978 I now define the package licence as:

MIT AND BSD-2-Clause AND BSD-3-Clause AND BSD-4-Clause-UC 
AND Linux-man-pages-copyleft AND Linux-man-pages-copyleft-one-para 
AND GPL-1.0-or-later AND GPL-2.0-only AND GPL-2.0-or-later

with the latest Linux-man-pages-copyleft-one-para.txt yet to be added to the LICENSES directory, and await the resolution of this issue #1959 for possible further change.

@alejandro-colomar
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@BrianInglis - when you say you shouldn't be looking at these man pages b/c they are old... but apparently they are still around and distributed

There are many unmaintained projects, packages, and their websites - see Sourceforge for lots of examples, and those products are still "distributed", like many old and even ancient system and package versions (Linux 2.00 man pages anyone?), even though they may not have been updated nor downloaded for many years (and for software, may contain many serious unfixed security vulnerabilities). Thus I refer to those man pages as merely providing examples of (possibly outdated, as of next release) licence text.

Those private man pages and related web pages have not been updated since @mkerrisk stopped maintenance two years ago after Linux 5.13 and glibc 2.34, possibly to concentrate on keeping his The Linux Programming Interface (course) book editions up to date to make up for pandemic losses giving online (and private/on premise) training courses in Europe and the Americas (booking a year ahead), conference presentations, and consulting on those topics (those web pages have been updated).

The Linux man pages project had no official maintainer after 5.13 for a ten month period during which time 921 commits had been applied for 6 Linux releases and associated glibc changes.

A minor correction. I was already maintainer since 2020, but didn't yet have keys to the repository. So I couldn't effectively update the official repository.

For comparison, since that release, 672 commits have been applied to date, and @alejandro-colomar has been doing a lot of housekeeping, standardizing, updating man pages to standards and also supporting [gt]roff -man commands, as the [gt]roff and -man maintainer fixes issues and updates macros. [Of course, one commit could be a patch affecting hundreds of files or lines.] We are now many releases later preparing for @alejandro-colomar to release Readme Linux man pages 6.05.

As of #1955 and #1978 I now define the package licence as:

MIT AND BSD-2-Clause AND BSD-3-Clause AND BSD-4-Clause-UC 
AND Linux-man-pages-copyleft AND Linux-man-pages-copyleft-one-para 
AND GPL-1.0-or-later AND GPL-2.0-only AND GPL-2.0-or-later

with the latest Linux-man-pages-copyleft-one-para.txt yet to be added to the LICENSES directory, and await the resolution of this issue #1959 for possible further change.

Yes, when all this is merged, I plan to add those license files to the repository, and change the files to use SPDX-License-Identifier.

@alejandro-colomar
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@BrianInglis - when you say you shouldn't be looking at these man pages b/c they are old... but apparently they are still around and distributed

The thing is that they are distributed from the official tarballs released in the kernel.org repository:

https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/

which are created from the git.kernel.org repo.

The github repo linked before was just a mirror that the previous maintainer (@mkerrisk) had for having more visibility of the project. However, he froze the mirror when he stopped maintaining the project. And anyway, that mirror was never officially used for anything. Downstream packagers never used it.

@adobes1 - I presume you created this request b/c these man-pages are included in Fedora (as per Fedora license policy)?

Yes, the man pages are used in Fedora, but they are taken from the kernel.org released tarballs. @nforro, the Fedora maintainer for the man-pages can probably confirm. The github repo is not involved in this.

@nforro
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nforro commented May 19, 2023

Yes, the man pages are used in Fedora, but they are taken from the kernel.org released tarballs. @nforro, the Fedora maintainer for the man-pages can probably confirm. The github repo is not involved in this.

Exactly: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/man-pages/blob/3d662119c3ae8bc2a38934b6c4304435251e19ca/f/man-pages.spec#_10

@jlovejoy
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ok, so back to the question for SPDX-legal:

as compared to https://spdx.org/licenses/Linux-man-pages-copyleft.html, does the omission of the sentence
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.

make this a different license or could we mark that sentence as optional?

personally, I have mixed feelings on this one....

@richardfontana
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I would view the two licenses as "different".

@jlovejoy
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jlovejoy commented May 25, 2023 •
edited

ok, let's get this one sorted on name as well. Given it is very similar to the existing Linux-man-pages-copyleft

I'd strongly suggest we use that id with some variant on it, such as:
Linux-man-pages-copyleft-nopro (I admit, I'm not crazy about this)
Linux-man-pages-copyleft-2 (arbitrary version number of some kind)

@Pizza-Ria
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Pizza-Ria commented May 25, 2023 •
edited

I really WANT to make this optional (as that is my default stance on most of these minor variations) but I could see that statement as being a bit of a supplement to the disclaimer - it seems to be more of a proactive statement than passive disclaimer. I do agree with associating this with the Linux-man-pages-copyleft moniker. How about Linux-man-pages-copyleft-alt? Also OK with -2. "nopro" doesn't feel intuitive on its own - I get it after reading this thread/diff but not sure it resonates on its own.

@BrianInglis
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BrianInglis commented May 25, 2023 •
edited

I would consider the sentence appears to me to be a pro-commercial/proprietary anti-open-source snark, implying if it was done professionally for commerical proprietary software or manuals, it would be better as the author(s) would have been paid!
I agree with @Pizza-Ria and really do not see this changing the Ts&Cs.

[In reality, commercial proprietary docs are often done in whatever time is available by whoever is available and only reviewed for inaccuracy or illegality before being stamped good enough to move on from. I've done 120 in a month, because that was the number needed, and when we needed to start churning out code!
Volunteer contributors to and maintainers of open source have more time to consider, be thorough, and produce a decent product, if they decide they are going to produce docs, which can be the hard sell! And the committers, like Alex, are not afraid to push back if needed.
Like many of us, I have voted with my wallet, only buying really good value products from vendors, as most open sourced products (e.g. PCs, Raspberry Pi) are better than most commercial proprietary anything, with rare exceptions.]

@alejandro-colomar
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I would consider the sentence appears to me to be a pro-commercial/proprietary anti-open-source snark, implying if it was done professionally for commerical proprietary software or manuals, it would be better as the author(s) would have been paid! I agree with @Pizza-Ria and really do not see this changing the Ts&Cs.

[In reality, commercial proprietary docs are often done in whatever time is available by whoever is available and only reviewed for inaccuracy or illegality before being stamped good enough to move on from. I've done 120 in a month, because that was the number needed, and when we needed to start churning out code! Volunteer contributors to and maintainers of open source have more time to consider, be thorough, and produce a decent product, if they decide they are going to produce docs, which can be the hard sell! And the committers, like Alex, are not afraid to push back if needed. Like many of us, I have voted with my wallet, only buying really good value products from vendors, as most open sourced products (e.g. _PC_s, Raspberry Pi) are better than most commercial proprietary anything, with rare exceptions.]

That's very true. I had a similar feeling recently. I'll relicense my pages to this license (when it gets an identifier).

I'm going to send a mail to linux-man@.

@alejandro-colomar
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alejandro-colomar commented May 26, 2023 •
edited

I would consider the sentence appears to me to be a pro-commercial/proprietary anti-open-source snark, implying if it was done professionally for commerical proprietary software or manuals, it would be better as the author(s) would have been paid! I agree with @Pizza-Ria and really do not see this changing the Ts&Cs.

[In reality, commercial proprietary docs are often done in whatever time is available by whoever is available and only reviewed for inaccuracy or illegality before being stamped good enough to move on from. I've done 120 in a month, because that was the number needed, and when we needed to start churning out code! Volunteer contributors to and maintainers of open source have more time to consider, be thorough, and produce a decent product, if they decide they are going to produce docs, which can be the hard sell! And the committers, like Alex, are not afraid to push back if needed. Like many of us, I have voted with my wallet, only buying really good value products from vendors, as most open sourced products (e.g. _PC_s, Raspberry Pi) are better than most commercial proprietary anything, with rare exceptions.]

On second thought, and after re-reading the license, a lot of truth is hidden in that sentence. Let's see:

< 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.

It doesn't really say that the care is less because of being a volunteer. It could perfectly mean a higher level of care, and it's often the case. (=D

@jlovejoy
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jlovejoy commented Jun 8, 2023 •
edited

ok, trying to reset a bit here: @alejandro-colomar - is this still being used in the Linux-man pages or did you manage to re-license the files that used it?

If it is being used still, then SPDX had already decided to accept it and that it is different enough to be its own license and so we "just" need to decide on an id. Linux-man-pages-copyleft-var is probably the best option. In any case, let's make a decision by Friday.

(interpretation of the extra sentence and feelings about it aside :)

@alejandro-colomar
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alejandro-colomar commented Jun 8, 2023 via email

@jlovejoy
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jlovejoy commented Jun 9, 2023

discussed on 6/8 call - accept and add with id: Linux-man-pages-copyleft-var

(b/c "prof" gives an odd impression)

@jlovejoy
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jlovejoy commented Jun 9, 2023 •
edited

License Inclusion Decision

Decision:

  • approved
  • not approved

Name

Linux man-pages Copyleft variant

License ID

Linux-man-pages-copyleft-var

XML markup

n/a

Notes:

This is the same as Linux-man-pages-copyleft but omits the last sentence of the third paragraph.

Additional rationale or notes on decision:

none

Next steps

If the license has been accepted, please follow the accepted-license process to create the PR.

@jlovejoy jlovejoy mentioned this issue Jun 9, 2023
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@alejandro-colomar
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alejandro-colomar commented Jun 9, 2023 via email

@swinslow swinslow changed the title New license request: Man-pages-copyleft-var [SPDX-Online-Tools] New license request: Linux-man-pages-copyleft-var Jun 11, 2023
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