-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wednesday 12 December 2001 12:56, Branden Robinson wrote:
> 3) Works licensed under the GNU FDL meet the DFSG if: > A) there are no Invariant Sections[*]; or > B) the only Invariant Sections consist of license texts which > apply to a work, or a substantively related work (such as the > program being documented, in the case of a manual). So the crux of this proposal is that emacs (a signature piece in the history of the Free Software) at least be moved into non-free, unless one includes only older versions of the package-- before the GFDL was applied to the manual/info text sections. In the source tarball from the FSF-- I'm unable to find an emacs > 19 source .deb, but it's the first time I've ever looked for a source .deb, so maybe I'm not looking in the right place-- emacs-21.1/etc/* contains numerous non-free, non-GFDL documents. So perhaps this is a necessary move on the part of the Debian community to get the FSF to clean up the emacs package a bit-- but it might be better swept under the rug for now and submitted as a bug patch. But even if they do clean it up, as long as the GFDL is used for the manual, I can't see them as willing to take the Manifesto out of the invariant sections list for the GNU Emacs Manual. And with good reason. Invariant sections can form an integral part of a manual/book, but one which does not affect the usability of the manual if shared. The portions you must be able to modify relate to the usage of the software-- so that if the software changes the manual can change with it. (imho) There is no reason to change the portion of the manual relating to the historical rationale for the development of the software, or the philosophy of Free Software, or the dedication of countless man-hours to one's dearly departed canine companion-- unless you are redistributing the manual and you hated the original author's dog because it bit you, in which case you might attach as invariant section your own screed about how great your cat is and how it can kick any dog's butt one pawed. And at some point the invariant section flamefest outweighs the utility of the manual itself and some bright writer or group of writers simply writes a different manual from scratch. While it is easy to see why it is inconvenient to have to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the document in question is "free enough" or appropriate for you, it seems unlikely that we're going to see massive abuse of the GFDL. If someone wants to include a whole novel as an invariant section of their manual, I assume the rest of their manual is proportionally larger and of extremely high quality. Otherwise no one in their right mind will accept the manual in the first place... I hope that Debian will not decide to adopt a proposal which essentially declares the GFDL a non-free license under some circumstances, especially since this will affect the contents of the main tree. If there is a single piece of GNU software that does not qualify for main, then it kind of makes the phrase "Debian GNU/Linux" a little funny, doesn't it? I apologize for the length of this email, but I've been following this thread in silence up to now, and I wanted to get my thoughts into a single, hopefully coherent form before sharing them. --Michael Libby ( [EMAIL PROTECTED] ) ===================================================== | My Public Key available from: keys.pgp.com | or http://www.ichimunki.com/public.key | | Its Fingerprint | D946 FE20 79EE 2109 161B FAFB E029 56F4 A330 AA73 ===================================================== -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE8F2aJ4ClW9KMwqnMRAiarAJ943o16avibR4JKSo2R4DPUTxs/IACbBnph Eg7aQjRhEcCCSrXbulG9v7M= =qGWI -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
