On Thu, Mar 06, 2003 at 06:35:24PM -0500, David Turner wrote: > On Wed, 2003-03-05 at 15:42, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > > The status quo is not tolerable, and if the comments are not published > > by the FSF soon, it seems to me that someone else should take the task > > upon them of publishing them. > They were eventually published: > http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.2-comments.txt
(in May 2002, linked from http://www.gnu.org/server/whatsnew.html; but in spite of the comment on that page, apparently not from http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html) On Thu, Mar 06, 2003 at 06:39:16PM -0500, David Turner wrote: > Sure -- that's one reason why the standardizing on the FSF's Four > Freedoms is so good -- invariant sections *clearly* don't serve any of > the four. So, considering the comments made and the FSF's lack of response [0], it's probably time for us to do a brief and simple "GNU FDL Considered Harmful" write up [1], and a review of our documentation to see what needs to be forked from an earlier version or moved into non-free. What, exactly, do we consider harmful about it? I'm not convinced that ``You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute.'' [2] is enough to make GFDL docs non-free even without invariant (&c) sections; applying that to things like an padlock or an off-switch on a photocopier doesn't seem entirely reasonable to me. I guess we need to cover: * What's wrong with the GFDL and what problems can it cause * What documentation authors can do to avoid these problems (use the GPL instead? avoid invariant sections?) * How the GFDL could be fixed Can someone other than me take care of this? Cheers, aj [0] See Branden's summary from November: http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200211/msg00285.html [1] A la KDE's old Qt v GPL issue, http://www.debian.org/News/1998/19981008 [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200211/msg00287.html -- Anthony Towns <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred. ``Dear Anthony Towns: [...] Congratulations -- you are now certified as a Red Hat Certified Engineer!''
pgpPGyxsjxzDL.pgp
Description: PGP signature
