Stefan,
yes we can avoid it in the future. We can start by not officially hosting anything with license violations.
As Stuart noted, licensing is critical to FOSS. And quite honestly, as a trustee, I would be 100% hypocritical if the Foundation discovered someone violating any of Gentoo’s licenses, if we continued to distribute the devmanual in its current form.
To briefly outline my thoughts:
- The license violations — every contributor needs to be acknowledged on par with every other contributor
- The document, if it is to be considered official, needs to actually be official:
- Its sources need to be on Gentoo controlled infrastructure
- Its branding should comply with Gentoo’s branding standards
Note that being official, means that Gentoo owns it. We do not own something that resides on some other server and whose access is restricted to everyone except the people in control of that server (who are not, for the most part, Gentoo developers). Also note that the branding issue solves the license violations.
So, despite the inconvenience, I believe it was a correct thing to remove the dns pointer to it, to limit Gentoo’s own liability in the license violation. The correct fix is to implement the items I listed above.
Flame on!