Re: Revert "Many Pages: Remove references to C89"

From: "Tom Schwindl" <schwindl@posteo.de>
To: "Alejandro Colomar" <alx.manpages@gmail.com>
Cc: <linux-man@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Revert "Many Pages: Remove references to C89"
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2023 18:10:34 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CR75QLUXYL2F.9ZFRDB68HXGW@morphine> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <a1a5ea63-9fbe-17f6-fe69-1850552a5422@gmail.com>

Hi Alex,

> > I have an archive of many drafts including (so far):
> > 
> >   1.5M Sep 10  1998 N0843-C1999-CD-1998-08.pdf
> >   3.4M May  6  2005 N1124-C1999+TC2-CD-2005-05.pdf
> >   3.7M Sep  8  2007 N1256-C1999+TC3-CD-2007-09.pdf
> >   1.7M Apr 12  2011 N1570-C201X-CD-2011-04.pdf
> >   2.3M Oct  9  2017 N2176-C2017-CD-2017-10.pdf
> >   6.7M Jan 24 11:37 N3088-C2023-CD1-2023-01.pdf
> > 
> > which can be downloaded as:
> > 
> > 	https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n####.pdf
>
> Do you know if we can distribute them?  which license applied to them?
> I'm worried that some distros are very strict in what can be distributed
> in a package (e.g., Fedora, Debian (main)).  There were issues with
> man-pages-posix in the past.
>
> Should we maybe open a separate project iso-c-drafts that installs
> drafts of the ISO C standards and maybe some scripts that will be useful
> with them?
>

This is probably a legal gray area and I'd be careful.
ISOs license agreement[0] explicitly states the following:

  > The ISO publication(s) you order is/are copyrighted by the International
  > Organization for Standardization. You acknowledge and agree to respect ISO’s
  > copyright in our publications by purchasing, downloading, copying or
  > otherwise using (an) ISO publication(s). Except as provided for under this
  > Licence Agreement, you may not lend, lease, reproduce, distribute or
  > otherwise commercially exploit ISO publication(s). In the case of joint
  > standards (such as ISO/IEC standards), this clause shall apply to the
  > respective joint copyright ownership.

As we (or a third party) can only produce a plaintext version by downloading the
original PDF draft and converting it, we agree with the above. Thus, we can't
"reproduce" or "distribute" the standard, at least that's my understanding[1].
I highly doubt that major distibutions would take that risk, nor should we.

[0] <https://www.iso.org/terms-conditions-licence-agreement.html#Customer-Licence>
[1] For the record: I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice. It's very well
    possible that I've overlooked something.

-- 
Best Regards,
Tom Schwindl