The LDP and Debian

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."

DLP with FOL OK?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It is part of the DSG

[Anonymous Coward]

It is part of the DSG -- that's right -- the Debian Stupidity Guidelines.

Some of the Guidelines you may recognize, if you have ever had the misfortune to use Debian:

• Stable release must contain software no less than 5 years out-of-date.
• Stable release must not be compatible with modern hardware.
• Software must be grouped into obscure and meaningless categories like "Contrib" "Main" "Non-Free" "HamRadio" "CheeseSandwich"
• Endless handwringing about licenses is required.
• Upgrades to "testing" branch must be bug-ridden and likely to make your computer unusable.
• User-friendliness is morally wrong. Make everything as difficult to use as possible.
• All Debian Developers must be gay, anarchists, smelly, or have some other major mental disability.
• Package manager must be the most difficult to use of any Linux distribution.
• All web browser packages must be so old that users are required to compile their own from scratch.
• KDE and Gnome must be difficult to get working, and impossible to easily remove from the system.
• All Debian Developers must swear to the Pledge of Free Software "All software must be free, communist, redistributable to the proletariat, under Gaia, with Liberty and Justice For All."
• All email messages to Debian mailing lists must be written in French, using EMACS, and signed with GPG.
• As much time as possible must be wasted on stupid projects, like "Hurd" "Debian BSD" "Debian on Windows" and others. At no time should effort be put into Debian Linux when it could instead be put into one of the other doomed projects.
• All releases must be given names with some kind of sexual subtext.
• Be sure to cripple the OS by removing software that does not conform to some cryptic licensing standards.

Solaris is better anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

it sure is. Isn't [deepchip.com] it ? [deepchip.com]

Re:...or rewrite from scratch

[lupercalia]

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. ;-)