Slackware Handbook

[Narayan Newton]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 10:48:14 -0500, Tom Rhodes <trhodes at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 13:10:58 +0100
> Christian Brueffer <chris at unixpages.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, Jan 23, 2005 at 11:13:40AM -0800, Narayan Newton wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > We at MadPenguin.org are creating a website to recreate the FreeBSD
> > > handbook for the Slackware Linux distribution. The quality and
> > > completeness of
> > > the FreeBSD docs is unparalleled in Linux. We feel that a "Slackware
> > > Handbook" would be very useful to many people.
> > >
> > > We have a wiki-like setup that will ease the burden of
> > > administration and allow the community to moderate the content. What
> > > would also help is to be able to copy sections of the FreeBSD handbook
> > > that are the same on Slackware. It is our understanding that the FreeBSD
> > > documentation is under a BSD-like license that allows copying and
> > > modification if the copyright is retained.
> > >
> > > We would like to confirm this and ask for permission to use the material
> > > from the FreeBSD Documentation community, as many have
> > > worked very hard to make this what it is. License or no, it wouldn't be
> > > right in our view to copy sections without approval of the community.
> > >
> >
> > Yes, the handbook and most (all?) of the other documentation is
> > distributed under a BSD license.
> >
> > See http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/LEGALNOTICE.html
> > for more information.
> >
> > So, as long as you honor the license, there's no problem in copying
> > sections and adapting them to Slackware (e.g. the DragonFly BSD guys
> > have done the same, http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~justin/handbook/).
> > Many sections have a 'Contributed by...' text on top, would be nice
> > if you'd keep them (although it's not required by the license).
> 
> Personally, I'd like the "Contributed by ..." to stay for
> sections which have them.  Having those sections shown to
> a wider audiance would help with spelling/grammar/correction
> fixes and the person(s) responsible would be easier to find
> by contributors who may want to submit patches.
> 
> Otherwise, I'm fine with Slackware mirroring our work.  :)
> 
> --
> Tom Rhodes
> 

Having the "Contributed by" line stay would be fine. We probably would
have done that anyway, but will definitely do it now.


-- 
Narayan Newton