On Wed, 2002-06-12 at 14:42, Joe Wreschnig wrote: > > I would like to see some way to mark sections unmodifiable but > removable/renamable, e.g. acknowledgements or dedications, at the very > least. I don't like or understand the FDL policy of making them > unremovable, but I do understand the need for making certain sections > unmodifiable (it's a lot harder to misrepresent someone with source code > than with documents). Remember, ideally this is not just for program > documentation.
As you have observed, there's a question about whether this is compatible with the DFSG, in letter or spirit. It seems that the biggest problem with the various documentation licenses floating around is the question of attribution. On the one hand, people want credit for what they did say; on the other, people don't necessarily want to be associated with an altered form of what they said. Most of the other problems can be reduced to one of those two. The plagarism question isn't really a problem, since this whole thing is motivated by freedom. Given that, I don't think that anyone would have a problem with others deriving new writings from their work as long as proper attribution is given. The only purpose I don't see served by this is the desire by some (the FSF, among others) to force people to distribute some manifesto or historical document in a set of documentation; a lot of people who value freedom seem to have a distaste for this, so I don't think it's important. So it seems to me that it would be useful to have a documentation license that was more strict about attribution. Perhaps it could require that all individual changes be clearly identified in a README. Or, all changes must be represented as patches against an original without prior approval from the original copyright holder. (If we do this, we should probably think about providing some way for a document to be "condensed" over time without losing attribution, so that the patches don't grow bigger than the document itself.) If such a license were available, then the need for Invariant Sections might be less. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
