GFDL/GPL issues

[Matthias Klose]

On 26.05.2010 02:44, Mark Mitchell wrote:
> In a biweekly call with the other GCC Release Managers, I was asked
> today on the status of the SC/FSF discussions re. GFDL/GPL issues.  In
> particular, the question of whether or not we can use "literate
> programming" techniques to extract documentation from code and take bits
> of what is currently in GCC manuals and put that into comments in code
> and so forth and so on.

there is another issue with the manual pages.  Debian considers GFDL licensed 
files with invariant sections and/or cover texts as non-free.  You may agree or 
disagree with this, but the outcome is that Debian has to ship the gcc 
documentation and the manual pages in its non-free section.  The issue was 
raised with the FSF some years ago, but issues with the GFDL seem to be low 
priority within the FSF (Mako may correct me).  It would be nice to know if the 
files used to generate the manual pages (gcc/doc/invoke.texi, 
gcc/fortran/gfortran.texi, gcc/java/gcj.texi) could be dual-licensed as well, so 
that is possible to provide basic documentation in Debian as well.

   Matthias