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From: Roberto Mello <[email protected]>
To: Tom Lane <[email protected]>
Cc: Joe Conway <[email protected]>
Cc: Peter Eisentraut <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Documentation in book length
Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2003 21:08:40 -0700
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>

On Thu, Jan 02, 2003 at 06:32:07PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> 
> BTW, the Red Hat RHDB group has spent a fair amount of time rethinking
> the overall organization of the docs and trying to organize 'em in a
> more logical order.  They'd like to contribute that work back so they
> don't have to maintain a variant version of the docs.  Is this a good
> time to think about looking over what they've done?

Allow me to insert a note about adisappointment of mine here, which 
happenned when I browsed the Red Hat DB documentation a few weeks ago.

I noticed that, besides the content being modified in some places, the  
authorship of the documents had been completely removed from the
documents. Also I noticed "Copyright 2001 Red Hat" in the documents, which
made me wonder if that was really right, legally speaking.

The two examples I can give you are in the PL/pgSQL documentation, both
the initial document page
(http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/database/RHDB-2.1-Manual/prog/plpgsql.html)
and the Oracle porting document I wrote
(http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/database/RHDB-2.1-Manual/prog/plpgsql-porting.html)

As far as my understanding of the BSD license applied to documents allows
anyone to modify said documents, saved the copyright notices are left.
However, it is very uncool to remove authorship credits from the
documentation. I don't see how removing such credits will make the Red Hat
DB documentation look any better or more "professional".

-Roberto

-- 
+----|        Roberto Mello   -    http://www.brasileiro.net/  |------+
+       Computer Science Graduate Student, Utah State University      +
+       USU Free Software & GNU/Linux Club - http://fslc.usu.edu/     +
Hey, whats that beeping noise? Wheres that smoke coming from?

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