John Goerzen wrote: >Secondly, there are pending court cases right now in the U.S. alleging >copyright violations from legal papers filed in court cases. Ugh. These people should be thrown out of court. Or perhaps just shot out of hand. ;-)
If they actually win, Debian *will* have to be *very* strict about licensing on licenses. >I don't see anybody forcing us to ship the GPL on our hard disks. I >do see us required to put it there *if we distribute GPL'd software*. >But that's the rub, isn't it? We're only required to distribute those >invariant sections if we distribute the manual. So we're back to >removing the GPL by the same argument that removes FDL documents. Well, there's always my favorite difference: The GPL is one piece of text. FDL'ed invariant sections are an arbitrary number of pieces of arbitrary text. (This could be called the 'de minimus' argument.) I have stated previously that I would have been happy if RMS had imposed the current conditions on the GCC and GNU Emacs manuals, without promoting the use of similar conditions for everyone. :-P This also partly explains why the status of the GNU Emacs manual was previously accepted and is not anymore. Previously, it was a one-off special case; now it is part of a herd (hurd?) of unmodifiable material being pushed, perversely, by the FSF. I have nothing against special exceptions when they're appropriate, but I do have something against general exceptions. How about runnning up a GR to amend the Debian Social Contract to explicitly allow the GPL? ;-) I bet it would pass. Then anyone who wants to allow a GFDL'ed document in knows the process; propose an amendment to the Social Contract, and see if you can get it passed. (-; -- Nathanael Nerode <neroden at gcc.gnu.org> http://home.twcny.rr.com/nerode/neroden/fdl.html
