On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, Georg C. F. Greve wrote: > If we ignore potential DMCA/EUCD/SW-patent issues, which are unrelated > to the issue at hand, it is always okay to write a GUI that can > display documents regardless of their license.
Sure, but it's clearly NOT ok to use some derived works of some GFDL-licensed documents as a part of that program. The problem has nothing to do with document viewers. It's that the distinction between documentation and software is fuzzy at best. In order for a work to be free, I must be able to include parts of it (meaning "compile into") free software. > In the special case that you seem to be referring to, which is as > author of a specialized help GUI, you could of course jump to the > relevant paragraphs/parts of the documentation directly. He's not talking about a specialized help gui. He's talking about a program which displays compiled-in text as part of it's help framework. To be more specific, it currently seems illegal for me to distribute the hypothetical software femto-emacs which runs on severely limited hardware and includes some snippets from the emacs manual. > The decision of what a user wants to read should be made by the user, > not by the author of his or her software. That's way too simplistic. Like software, decisions are made by the author, the derived-work authors, and the distributors. The user gets to pick from available choices (unless she is also a derived-work author). Free software very clearly recognizes this. ONLY by giving derived-work authors and distributors free reign over the functionality/content of the work will users actually get any choice in what to run/read. I don't see that free documentation, free media, or free art is any different. Reserving the right to make arbitrary modifications makes it non-free. -- Mark Rafn [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://www.dagon.net/>
