Richard Stallman wrote:
>It's not just a continuation of the status quo that is taking place
>here. The FSF has adopted an expansionist policy with respect to
>Invariant Sections.
The choice of words in this text that you cited indicates a desire to
cast the FSF's actions in a harsh light. I think that the only such
statements deserve is to point out that fact.
This is a very important point. I have stated before that I would
not have serious objections to the FSF issuing a small number of
non-free manuals for a good reason, as it has been doing for 15
years.
The FSF manuals are all free documentation by our criteria. We are
the ones who first started to say that documentation should be free,
and we are the ones who first wrote criteria for free documentation
And the first people to write a license for free software were at the
University of California, Berkeley, I believe. Is this relevant?
Having an idea first is important, but it doesn't mean that you've got
it right. Generally the first person to have an idea gets it
approximately right, but it is refined by later thinkers, who see points
the first discoverer may have missed.
I hope that Debian developers will vote to follow our criteria for
free documentation, but they have the right to choose differently.
However, you cannot expect us to follow your choice if it differs from
ours. Ultimately we and Debian may simply have to disagree.
^^--(meaning the people running the FSF presumably)
Quite right. A large degree of this discussion has been with people who
seem to feel that Debian must follow whatever the FSF chooses, or that
it must follow some kind of special, unusual procedure if it wishes to
disagree with the FSF, but that is nonsense.
Of course, I think that the FSF should consider the views of those
devoted contributors to FSF programs who are avoiding working on FSF
manuals because of the FSF "Invariant Section" policies, and have been
since we discovered these policies. I, for one, feel that we have been
ignored and disregarded in a high-handed and summary fashion. This is
probably why I tend to view the FSF's actions here in a harsh light.
But the FSF has no actual obligation to consider its contributors, so
you may choose to disregard and alienate them, and we cannot expect you
to make any other choice. I think this is not in the long-term best
interests of the FSF or the free software movement, however.
Thank you for your time and calm commentary.
--Nathanael
