OpenGL manpages

[David Nusinow]

On Mon, Dec 11, 2006 at 09:55:59AM -0800, Jon Leech wrote:
> Vickenty Fesunov writes:
> > I am interested in a fate of the OpenGL, GLU and GLX manpages shipped
> > with every X release since I was a child, and which vanished with
> > transition to the modular release structure in the 2005.
> >
> > In an old revision of ModularFilesMissing in the X.org wiki ([1]), these
> > manpages are marked as dropped in favor of "SGI upstream", mentioning
> > some consensus, no traces of which I could find in the archives of
> > xorg-modular mailing list.
> >
> > SGI apparently have stopped maintaining these manpages way back in the
> > 1997 (the date of last change of manpages downloaded from SGI site;
> > while X.org 6.9.0 features manpages which are dated by the year 1998).
> >
> > Having said this much, I wonder, if anyone maintains these manual pages,
> > what license applies to them (either [2] or some other license), and if
> > nobody maintain them, may I just clean them up a bit and distribute them
> > that way?
> 
>     As Brian noted, the ARB (now a working group within the broader
> Khronos organization, www.khronos.org) is updating the man pages for
> OpenGL 2.1, and will be maintaining them actively going forward. They
> are essentially complete now, but we have to determine acceptable
> copyrights for new pages from various non-SGI sources, which I'm
> starting to talk with some X.org folks about, before a public release.
> Hopefully that can get sorted out in the next couple of weeks.
> 
>     The original SGI man pages are under the SGI "Free Software B"
> license, which is a BSD-like license that may still be present in some
> of the GLX code in X.org as well.

Would it be possible to get these manpages licensed under something more
permissive than this license? Debian currently considers this license
non-free due to the restriction on hardware implementations in section 2.3
of the current version. We are currently evaluating our plans with respect
to the GLX code for our future releases, and if we have the opportunity to
have these manpages licensed under a more traditional Free license, I'd
prefer to see it. 

Given that the manpages aren't likely to be an issue for anyone's business
plan, putting these under a normal MIT/X11 or BSD license would be very
helpful to the Free Software community.

 - David Nusinow