Using mailman output in web page documentation
I found it convenient to use mechanical dumps of mailman pages in attempting to create some moderator documentation, intended primarily for local use at the university where I work.
Such dumped pages do not contain any formal copyright/left statement beyond alt="GNU's NOT Unix"
- Is there a suitable comment one could/should (should not?) add to attribute the source of such excerpts to GNU (GFDL?).
I use HTML dumps rather than screenshots so that I can modify them to create a mockup of a page which refers to a particular mailing list by name, and actually links variously to the real mailman server links, or further mockups as seems appropriate (to me).
In addition, form items such as radio buttons will tend to appear in the manner the particular browser will display them on the real page.
Adrian Pepper P.S. That's enough to start. Further analysis and tangential questions "2. and 3." exist already, perhaps in response to followups.
On 12/17/2015 02:57 PM, Adrian Pepper wrote:
I found it convenient to use mechanical dumps of mailman pages in attempting to create some moderator documentation, intended primarily for local use at the university where I work.
Such dumped pages do not contain any formal copyright/left statement beyond alt="GNU's NOT Unix"
- Is there a suitable comment one could/should (should not?) add to attribute the source of such excerpts to GNU (GFDL?).
I am neither a lawyer nor an expert in free/open source licenses, so take this with a grain of salt.
Mailman is produced by the GNU Mailman project which is a GNU project. As such, the Mailman developers have assigned copyright to the Free Software Foundation and Mailman is distributed and licensed under the GPL (v2 for Mailman 2.1).
Section 0. of the GPL says
<quote> 0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License. The "Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in the term "modification".) Each licensee is addressed as "you".
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does. </quote>
The HTML produced by Mailman's CGI modules does contain lots of literal strings (or translations thereof) which are part of the program, so it is at least arguable that this HTML is a derivative work.
Thus, I think a brief statement to the effect that this HTML is copyright by the Free Software Foundation, Inc. and licensed under the GPL would be appropriate
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Mark Sapiro writes:
On 12/17/2015 02:57 PM, Adrian Pepper wrote:
I found it convenient to use mechanical dumps of mailman pages in attempting to create some moderator documentation, intended primarily for local use at the university where I work.
Such dumped pages do not contain any formal copyright/left statement beyond alt="GNU's NOT Unix"
- Is there a suitable comment one could/should (should not?) add to attribute the source of such excerpts to GNU (GFDL?).
FDL is not possible without permission of the FSF. All of Mailman is licensed under the GPL, including documentation and text included in the executable program. (My personal recommendation is that the FDL should be avoided in favor of any other free license in use by the project. Eg, technically FDL+GPL does not permit anyone but the FSF to move documentation out of code into manuals, or from manuals into code. It also has a number of obnoxious provisions like cover texts and invariant sections which are explicitly intended to be abused to make political statements that downstream is expected to disagree with, and pander to commercial interests.)
I am neither a lawyer nor an expert in free/open source licenses, so take this with a grain of salt.
IANAL, but I'm somewhat knowledgable.
Mailman is produced by the GNU Mailman project which is a GNU project. As such, the Mailman developers have assigned copyright to the Free
This phrasing is somewhat inaccurate. Assignment is not required of GNU projects, nor is assignment to the FSF restricted to GNU projects. It happens that Mailman has a policy of assigning to the FSF.
Software Foundation and Mailman is distributed and licensed under the GPL (v2 for Mailman 2.1).
v2 or later.
The HTML produced by Mailman's CGI modules does contain lots of literal strings (or translations thereof) which are part of the program, so it is at least arguable that this HTML is a derivative work.
It's clearly a derivative work.
Thus, I think a brief statement to the effect that this HTML is copyright by the Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Adrian's copyright is probably also involved. I'm not sure it's a good idea to mention the FSF specifically here. If anybody wants to do something with Adrian's documentation beyond what's permitted by the GPL, they probably need to talk to him first anyway, unless his whole documentation really is just saved HTML as created by the Mailman CGI.
and licensed under the GPL would be appropriate.
The FSF's current preferred form for source code is
GNU Mailman is free software: you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.
GNU Mailman is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with GNU Mailman. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.What I personally would do in HTML is put "This document is derived from GNU Mailman, and distributed under the same terms." at the end of the document, and then link to the GPL on the GNU site. Also add the text above as an HTML comment, or better yet as ALT= text for the link.
I'm as picky as anyone about these things. I'm mentioning this as the *maximum* you would want to do (anything more leads to maintenance problems in the long run).
participants (3)
-
Adrian Pepper -
Mark Sapiro -
Stephen J. Turnbull