Message-ID: &lt;19970531140818.01811@penguin.wi.leidenuniv.nl&gt;
Date: Sat, 31 May 1997 14:08:18 +0200
From: &quot;J.H.M. Dassen&quot; &lt;jdassen@wi.LeidenUniv.nl&gt;
To: submit@bugs.debian.org
Subject: perl: perl FAQ is non-free
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Organization: SEIS group, CS dept., Leiden University

Package: perl
Version: 5.004-1

From perlfaq(1p):
|Copyright (c) 1997 Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington.  All rights
|reserved.
|
|Noncommercial Reproduction
|
|Permission is granted to distribute this document, in part or in full, via
|electronic means or printed copy providing that (1) that all credits and
|copyright notices be retained, (2) that no charges beyond reproduction be
|involved,

This is not the case for Debian CDs; they may for instance be in a package
deal with consultancy contracts.

|and (3) that a reasonable attempt be made to use the most current version
|available.
|
|Furthermore, you may include this document in any distribution of the full
|Perl source or binaries, in its verbatim documentation, or on a complete
|dump of the CPAN archive, providing that the three stipulations given above
|continue to be met.

As Debian CDs may involve charges surpassing reproduction costs, we
unfortunately fall under the case of
|Commercial Reproduction
|
|Requests for all other distribution rights, including the incorporation in
|part or in full of this text or its code into commercial products such as
|but not limited to books, magazine articles, or CD-ROMs, must be made to
|perlfaq-legal@perl.com.  Any commercial use of any portion of this document
|without prior written authorization by its authors will be subject to
|appropriate action.

From Debian policy manual 2.1.3.3:
|2.2 non-free Section
|
|   Packages
|     * whose copyright permission notices (or patent problems) do not
|       allow distribution and copying for profit, no matter how large or
|       small the amount is, or
[...]
|   may only be placed in the semi-supported non-free section of the
|   Debian FTP archives.

This unfortunately means that the perl FAQ will have to be dropped from the
main distribution.

Please contact the FAQ authors, and explain them why the FAQ cannot go into
our main distribution, and what the consequences of that are (the FAQ being
excluded by most CD-ROM vendors). Hopefully, they'll reconsider these
restrictive copying restrictions, and put it under the same terms as perl
itself (thus virtually ensuring that every system with perl on it will have
the FAQ too) or other free terms.

After all, the goal of a FAQ is to disseminate information as much as possible
(and thus improve the signal-to-noise ratio of related newsgroups/mailing
lists).

You might want to quote perlfaq1(1p) on &quot;Why is it free?&quot;.

-- System Information
Debian Release: 1.3
Kernel Version: Linux penguin.wi.leidenuniv.nl 2.0.30 #9 Sat Apr 12 16:41:04 CEST 1997 i586 unknown

Versions of the packages perl depends on:
ldso	Version: 1.9.2-3
libc5	Version: 5.4.23-4
libdb1	Version: 1.85.4-3
libgdbm1	Version: 1.7.3-19
-- 
Ray Dassen &lt;jdassen@wi.LeidenUniv.nl&gt;