On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 10:34:16PM -0500, Raul Miller wrote: > On 3/13/06, Glenn Maynard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Debian has labelled a license with serious, onerous practical problems free. > > Oh? > > I find myself quite uncertain as to what it is that you're talking about. > > I see two issues mentioned in other messages, the DRM issue (the > "technical measures" clause), and the Opaque issue. > > Are those what you are talking about? Or are there other problems?
Those are the big, simple ones. Some other problems that have come up in the past: It requires preserving any section titled "History", required adding it if it's not there, and requires adding stuff to it. It doesn't seem clear what "preserve" means, however. If it means that History is an append-only-invariant-section, it seems like *all* GFDL documents contain an unmodifiable section. I'm not sure, though: it says "preserve", but not "preserve, unaltered in their text", as it does for Invariant Sections, and "preserve" alone is not defined. It prohibits modifying several section titles. It gives a prescribed method for translation that's likely to be inappropriate and awkward. It prevents labelling sections "History" or "Endorsements" if they're, say, talking about the history of the topic (and not the history of the work) and disucssing endorsements rather than giving them. It requires maintaining dedications, even when inappropriate; if I use a page from your work, I have to preserve "Dedicated to Raul's dad". It requires adding an "appropriate copyright notice for your modifications"; I don't know what that means, if I've placed my modifications into the public domain, or if my modifications come from a third-party public domain source. The "identify you as the publisher" bit seems to fail the Dissident test; at least on a natural reading (perhaps not a legal one), that seems to prohibit using an alias. "equally prominent and visible" seems to prohibit stylization; preventing me from publishing a modified version with a cool stylized title page seems like a patent violation of DFSG#3 to me. (I have no idea what the *purpose* of that restriction is--it's not like the title can't be changed; on the contrary, 4a mandates changing it.) The degree of some of these problems is debatable (none of this is new), but in sum, I can't honestly call this "free". What bothers me almost as much is that I havn't seen cohesive responses to these or other problems. I can deal with rational disagreement: "this is why we don't think this restriction is a problem"--but we don't seem to have that. Instead, we've been handed down the result, and we're expected to use IK or something to force-fit the DFSG to reach the desired outcome. -- Glenn Maynard -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]