Richard Stallman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Saying "you can modify the documentation, just not the invariant > sections" isn't enough, incidentally, to answer this, because the > attachment of the invariant section to the documentation *is* a > property of the documentation. (Consider if there were such a thing > on a piece of software: you can modify all these functions, but not > that one. The result is that the whole thing is nonfree.) > > This would be like having a technical section which can't be changed. > That would be non-free, but it's not what our actual invariant sections do.
Suppose the function you can't change is not technical. Does something become "technical" because you wrap a defun around it? A fundamental problem is "how do you distinguish software from documentation"? It is certainly true that there are obvious cases, but Debian is concerned with the cases where there is overlap. Among other things, we are especially concerned that there are programming styles in which the overlap is deliberately courted (Knuth's Literate Programming is an excellent example). Are the comments in a program "technical" or "documentation"? Would we accept as free software a program that said "you must leave intact the following political comment"? It would not currently pass the tests for free software. What if I interweave the technical and political parts? The GFDL encourages a rigid line between programs and documentation, between political and technical text, and in this it is already having bad effects.
