Hello, [I send a copy of this to debian-legal list] I am sorry to say I find your GNU Free Documentation License draft too complex.
For example: How can I know what I should do to add two paragrafs of a FDLed document to my FDLed document? From my first read I understand I should add a Front Cover invariant section on the back cover, keeping my title to 5 words and not distributing more than 100 copies. ;-) I had the idea of FSF working for freedom of redistribution and modification of documents and not for helping authors to put strange and complex limits to the documents they do. I thought this was work for others. I'll explain what I'm trying to say: In free software the authors that wanted to make his/her software free, without worrying of anything else but programming, used GPL. The people or companies who wanted advertisements or more restrictive conditions on their programs developed other licenses. (And then the people at Debian had to mess with legal stuff to see if those licenses could be considered free software) Now with documents the FSF is doing the job of that restrictive people who wants more restrictive conditions on their documents. And I ask: WHY? If you still want to do that job for them it is ok, but PLEASE first develop another simple and really free document license. A license in which we don't have to use one thounsand option rejections (with no invariants, no front cover, no back cover, no title...) and still not being sure if we are doing the right thing. I would like to see something similar to: Open Content License http://opencontent.org/opl.shtml but with the trust all of us have from GNU and FSF. Should I remember you that most of us don't believe in the intellectual property? And that what we want is just that if someone uses our work he will have to give us the same rights to use his/her derived work. I thought this was the idea and not the acknoledgement of the original author. Conclusion: Please if you are going to continue with this license, develop another one for the convinced free authors, developers and users, without all that legal mess, or recomend Open Content License if that license is legally right. Thank you, ----------------------------------------------------- Antonio Arauzo Azofra Ph.D. Student in the Dept. of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence E.T.S.I.Informatica. University of Granada, Spain(EU)
