Jérôme Marant wrote: > Again, moving a program to non-free will motivate people to > write a free equivalent.
Actually, moving a program to non-free has historically been much more likely to convey a message to the author of that program: "WAKE UP!" When the author wakes up and realizes that their license is keeping their program off of Debian CD's and relegating it to a backwater, they might do something about it. Dozens of licenses have been changed after things were put in non-free. The KDE/Qt issue is prehaps the best example of Debian spurring this sort of awareness and change. > But I can bet such thing is unlikely to often happen with documentation. I think what I've described is just as likely, or more likely to happen with documentation. If I write a program and GPL it, and GFDL the documentation, and then Debian rips my tarball in two, puts the docs in some "non-free" thing, and puts the code on a CD with only minimal docs, I will be really pissed off at this mess they've made of things. Especially when users start to complain to me. But I may eventually also wake up, realize that the GFDL is doing me no good, and find a better license. > David Harris and friends > will never ever write a hundreds pages documentation only > because the equivalent is not free. I don't really dispute this. O'Reilly has done more harm than good if you look at things in a certian way[1]. Nobody wants to write definitive documentation for a free software program if they can buy an O'Reilly book for $20, and so it's hard to find certian types of documentation for many programs if you don't have $20 or a bookstore handy. But sitting back and doing nothing, when we have a chance to change the status quo for the better is not a good plan either. The trick is to convince the people who are writing the documentation to make it free. -- see shy jo [1] Recent Creative Commons and O'Reilly developments nonwithstanding..
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