The package php-manual-en ships with documentation that is under the Open Publication License (OPL) 1.0. This license usage calls out two optional clauses of the OPL that make the content not freely modifiable or distributable. Fedora uses the OPL *only* without the optional clauses. The file is: file:///usr/share/doc/php-manual/en/html/copyright.html Below are two texts. (A) shows the license as how it currently appears in the package. (B) shows how it could appear. We may also want to update the copyright notice, although if the content hasn't changed at all since then, perhaps not. Since this is an upstream project you need to coordinate with, please use me <kwade> if you need any help explaining the situation to them. (A) Copyright © 1997 - 2006 by the PHP Documentation Group. This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later. A copy of the Open Publication License is distributed with this manual, the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/. Distribution of substantively modified versions of this document is prohibited without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. Distribution of the work or derivative of the work in any standard (paper) book form is prohibited unless prior permission is obtained from the copyright holder. In case you are interested in redistribution or republishing of this document in whole or in part, either modified or unmodified, and you have questions, please contact the copyright holders at doc-license.net. Note that this address is mapped to a publicly archived mailing list. The Chapter 46 section of the documentation is based on an initial contribution by Zend Technologies. (B) Copyright © 1997 - 2006 by the PHP Documentation Group. This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later. A copy of the Open Publication License is distributed with this manual, the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/. In case you are interested in redistribution or republishing of this document in whole or in part, either modified or unmodified, and you have questions, please contact the copyright holders at doc-license.net. Note that this address is mapped to a publicly archived mailing list. The Chapter 46 section of the documentation is based on an initial contribution by Zend Technologies.
Sent to doc-license.net: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hi As a volunteer in the Fedora Project [1], a popular Linux distribution, I help to package the PHP documentation. Since we, like most Linux distributions, include the PHP language, it seems helpful to our users to include the electronic reference manual too. It has been brought to my attention [2] that the current PHP documentation license prevents the distribution of modified copies of the work, which thus makes it ineligible [3] for inclusion in Fedora, and most likely other distributions which have policies about their content being exclusively Free (the definition of which generally requires the right to modify and distribute modified works). Whilst I recognise that a licensing change may be regarded as significant on your part, it seems to me to be a great shame to have to omit the PHP manual from Free distributions due to the limiting clauses. I wonder therefore whether there is any possibility that you would consider removing the restrictive licensing clauses? Thanks for your much-valued work on the PHP manual, and your time and consideration of this licensing point. Tim [1] http://fedoraproject.org [2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=419081 [3] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#SoftwareLicenses
I see that there is some discussion in that thread, but these docs will either need to be relicensed (by upstream) or pulled before F9.
Thread on the doc-license list starts here: http://news.php.net/php.doc.license/172 I can't see any hope of an immediate relicensing so I will pull for F9 alpha.
Retired from F9+ in CVS for now. If licensing changes I will put back in.
Good news - the license upstream has changed to Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which is OK according to the licensing guidelines. So I'll look at getting this back in again :-)