MJ Ray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Three problems with that hypothesis:- > > 1. We don't have any way of distinguishing software and this documentation > in a safe manner. My local research suggests that software is generally > treated as a literary work and electronic documentation definitely is. > Even if Debian can distinguish them, I'm not sure that the law can.
If we want to make a distinction, we want to make it for our own sake, not for legal reasons. We can chose completely arbitrary rules (as long as we don't encourage copyright infringement, of course). For our peace of mind, they should be consistent, but even that is unnecessary. For example, we could happily distribute unmodified RFCs from a legal point of view, but we might well reject the very cumbersome restrictions on derived works, and choose to distribute it nevertheless (*gasp*), but with an attached "non-free" sticker (obviously for purely political reasons). (I don't want to ridicule the approach towards RFCs. After some consideration, I find it perfectly sound. It's hardly a burden anyway; for those following stable, an RFC mirroring script is much more practical.) > 2. The documentation is not the issue. The entire FDL-covered work is. In my eyes, the GNU Manifesto is an integral part of the GNU Emacs documentation. > 3. What about other content? Can be decided case-by-case. For example, if the maintainer is forced to do something which would violate the license (or a user makes a convincing real-world case that the license fails to provide him with his natural rights to this content), it still can be removed.
