Subj : Re: about to blow a gaske To : Deuce From : Grymmjack Date : Mon May 23 2005 12:17 pm > > i wonder just how legal my copy of man(1) is. > A largish number of BSD man pages were rewritten to a void copyright issues. > most of teh ones that are applicable were lifted by Linux. As for all the > rest, many of them are only quasi legal. Most of the though have a BSD like > licence in their past somewhere (remember, 32V was released under a BSDish > licence too). Generally it's stuff like the rc manpage... stuff that Linux > explicitly modeled after SysV whose manpages are stil classic SysV. (Notice > the man page mentions a README in /etc/init... ever seen one?) that makes sense. how is it possible to sell it then without getting sued? for example, red hat sells theirs for way more than it's worth (imo, but i hate all things redhat) ... shouldn't the documentation authors and so on get some kind of reimbursement for their efforts? isn't redhat liable for some crime if they are selling property which is not theirs to sell? i can understand the way freebie distros make money but even still, i wonder if they are truly legal too.. the gnu and the free software foundation or whatever must have stepped on some toes when they were building the ark to save all of us furry bastards from the impending flood of gatesian proportions. and no i've never seen a README in /etc/init, but is it possible they were referring to the original older version of the distro and just didn't update the new docs? i find that often much of what you read about is incorrect or absent in man pages. of course this is much less heinous than not telling us about things at all. - grymmjack .