On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 03:51:06PM +0200, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote: > On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 12:15:32AM +0200, > Henning Makholm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote > a message of 33 lines which said: > > > ?) The GFDL is not free when applied to documents if any of > > the "invariant" or "cover" options are exercised. > > Is it a consensus on debian-legal that a GFDL work *without* any > Invariant or Cover is indeed free and has no problem being distributed > in "main"?
Not quite. This mailing list's analysis of the GFDL has revealed other, subtler problems with the license, but I think it's safe to say that if the FSF were willing to modify the license to rectify the "Invariant" or "Covert Texts" restrictions in a way we'd regard as DFSG-free, they probably wouldn't have a problem making the other much smaller changes we'd likely request. The FSF is standing in defense of Invariant Sections and Cover Texts on principle, however what exactly those principles are have not been clearly articulated as far as I can tell, are not present on the FSF/GNU website, and appear to be different from the FSF's principles regarding software freedom. In my opinion, the FSF has not been completely forthcoming on these matters. I think we would all benefit if they would shed some light on these matters. -- G. Branden Robinson | "Why do we have to hide from the Debian GNU/Linux | police, Daddy?" [EMAIL PROTECTED] | "Because we use vi, son. They use http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | emacs."
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