Hi, Alex!

I'd like to request a different choice of name for the SPDX license tag
used by the man-pages documents affected by this change.  It's my
understanding that there is freedom to make such a choice because the
proposed tag does not yet appear in the SPDX license list[1].

I have a few reasons: (1) the license tag says "Verbatim" which implies
to me that permission to modify the document is excluded--but it is not;
(2) with the exception of the paragraph about the kernel and system
libraries being in flux, this license appears identical to what I (and
some folks in Debian) started terming the "traditional GNU documentation
license) about 18 years ago when debate over the GNU FDL was raging[2];
this was in fact the license the GNU project used for most of its
documentation before it promulgated the FDL.  As far as I know, this
license text has no earlier provenance; I would appreciate correction on
this point.  Thirdly, since that time, the GNU project has christened
the license terms for many of its web pages the "GNU Verbatim Copying
License"[3].  You can perhaps see how this might generate confusion.

Because the warranty-disclaiming third paragraph about the Linux kernel
is unique to the Linux man-pages project and the term "verbatim" implies
too much restriction in my view, I envision a few alternatives.

man-pages-doc
man-pages-document-copyleft
man-pages-copyleft

Any of the above could be further prefixed with "Linux-" to reinforce
the specificity to this project, of course.  If pressed for a
preference, I reckon I would pick "Linux-man-pages-copyleft".

I feel that the "VERBATIM" string is similarly misleading, but it's not
presented as an SPDX license tag, and I see that its use is already
well-entrenched.  I expected to find something like a sed script in the
man-pages scripts/ directory that manipulated lines matching
'%%%LICENSE_START(' but failed to.  Perhaps a convenient new moniker
could be adopted to supersede "VERBATIM" in this context, once the SPDX
tagging initiative is complete?

Regards,
Branden

At 2021-09-05T15:25:41+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:

To simplify understanding which license applies to each file,
let's use SPDX markings, which are simple, informative, and
commonly used in many projects.
Let's also follow REUSE <https://reuse.software/> conventions.

[...]

[1] https://spdx.org/licenses/
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/09/msg00264.html
[3] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#VerbatimCopying