Transplanted from debian-private which maybe wasn't the right place to send this originally.
Other people have already some of the concepts in this message, but perhaps this post will still be useful. ----- Forwarded message from Raul Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----- Manoj Srivastava <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > However, I do not think that standards documents (and possibly other > categories) benefit from being modifiable. Before going too far with this logic, please consider several cases: (1) standard document modified by some random person in some pointless fashion. (2) standard document modified to fix simple grammatical or structural problems. (3) standard document supplemented by some other document, either clarifying its use or extending the standard in some way. (4) extracting standard text as to include as comments in some piece of software intended to represent that standard. (5) new standards body carrying on work left unfinished by original standards body. (6,7) Manoj already mentioned translations and reformatting. There are other cases, but I think these capture at least some of the flavors that need to be considered. It's important to recognize that DFSG already provides a mechanism which preserves the integrity of a standard: that's the "you must relabel the document if you change it" type of license. It's also important to recognize that the DFSG does not even address the problem of preventing buggy software. I feel that stupid modifications of standards documents are in some way analogous to this. Now, perhaps there's other good ways of preserving the integrity of a standards document without strangling the distribution of standards excerpts or standards derivatives. If so, I'm completely in favor of these. And, pragmatically, I think we should somehow make available standards documents which forbid either quoted extracts or derivative documents available (for example, in non-free), as long as they're redistributable. But I don't think we should consider such licenses to be ideal. -- Raul ----- End forwarded message -----
