Subj : Re: about to blow a gaske
To   : Grymmjack
From : Deuce
Date : Tue May 24 2005 12:00 pm

  Re: Re: about to blow a gaske
  By: Grymmjack to Deuce on Mon May 23 2005 12:17:00

 > 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 ge
 > 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.

Generally, the documentation authours get reimbursed by the company they work
for.  As for Redhat specifically, afaik, the onus is on the copyright holder to
contact Redhat and get the manpage out of the distro (I seem to recall a few
instances of jsut that)

As for the manual reprinters, they're so far removed from culpability that
they're completely safe.  What ended up happening a lot of the time is
something like this:

1) Eddie needs the functionality of the NIS subsystem.
2) Eddie is used to Solaris, so he references the manpage and uses a Solaris
box to test against.
3) Eddie gets everything working (hooray!)
4) Eddie swipes the Solaris man page, modifies it as required for his
implementation, and includes it with his pacakge.
5) Redhat sees a complete NIS pacakge and adds it to their distro.

So, it turns out that Eddie is the one who broke copyright.  Redhat is not
responsible for tracking down any possible copyright violations in every
package they include, that's up to the original authour.

And, in my opinion, incorrect manpages are MUCH MORE heinous that missing ones.
You try to read a manpage and it's not there, you go somewherer else for the
information.  You read the manpage, frob about based on the information there,
get completely messed up, THEN go somewhere else for the information... knowing
now that you can't trust the documentation.  It makes reading manpages an utter
waste of time.

This is actually one of my biggest problems with Linux.

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