Update to LFS License

Bruce, this also affects CLFS and HLFS, we should be included in this discussion.

Bruce, the way you phrased the summary has left me a little unclear. To me, the construction of your sentences don't seem to flow logically, so I'm left guessing a bit as to what you mean. Can you perhaps clarify and/or extend it with more details?

For example, your first sentence, reads to me as: "Despite the fact that the LFS license is pretty open, I tried to get the LDP to accept the BLFS license and they didn't approve of it."

And your second sentence reads to me as: "To fix the issue where the LDP won't accept BLFS because of its license, I suggest that LFS use the same type of license that BLFS uses."

I'm really not trying to nitpick, I'm just afraid I don't understand.

Sorry that I wasn't more clear.

Despite the fact that the LFS license is pretty open, I tried to get the LDP to accept BLFS using the LFS license and they didn't approve of it. It is not an "approved" Open Source license: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/

To be "acceptable" to the open source world, we need to use an approved license [or get a lawyer :) ].

Clear?

Yes, thank you. Sorry for the trouble. :)

Patch to update LFS LegalNotice to the same as BLFS

I added a patch to update the legal notice. Besides the additional files, minor changes were needed to index.xml, prologue/bookinfo.xml, and stylesheets/xhtml/lfs-legalnotice.xsl

With the patch, the book validates, renders, and all the links work properly.

We also need to take into account section 5 of TLDP's Manifesto at http://www.tldp.org/manifesto.html. Specifically http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/browser/trunk/BOOK/prologue/bookinfo.xml?rev=7535#L27 no longer accurately details LFS' principal authors. I don't want to get into a discussion just yet of who should or shouldn't be listed (or even what criteria is used to determine a principal author), I'm merely noting that, to my knowledge, nobody has assigned their copyrights to Gerard.

Before any licensing changes happen, please discuss with all the books, to make sure they are in agreement. Also make sure Gerard is in agreement also.

All of us in CLFS want to understand why the change, the reason for the change. What's the benefits of the change, what are the downsides of the change. Does this change need to happen in 6.2, or can it wait until all leaders can discuss this issue.

The license we use in LFS (and copied into CLFS and HLFS) is an ad hoc statement of our intent, but has not be vetted by anyone with legal training. To be compatible with open source "methods and concepts" we really need to use a license that is genearally accepted as proper for an open source project. These licenses can be found at http://www.opensource.org/licenses/.

Currently BLFS uses the AFL for code (use as you like) and the Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) for the rest of the text.

Earlier in a post, the Educational Community License was suggested, but that does not seem to assure attribution or prohibit commercialization.

Perhaps this should be discussed more fully on lfs-dev.

Bruce,

If you change the license your going to have some issues.

1 - Who's going to take care of the license violations. LFS is a volunteer

organization who's going to have the time to pursue this legally.

2 - You have people working on CLFS/LFS/HLFS that have commercial ties, you may

loose people like Ryan and myself due to the license change.

3 - Build techniques for a Linux system are documented everywhere, we could be

violating someone else's license.

4 - What about current distro's who have based themselves on LFS, how would this

affect them.

Moved to future per Gerard's request.

I don't think we can sort all the legal issues out in time for 6.3. Punting to 'future' for the time being.

This was fixed June 3rd in Revision 8548