On Thu, Apr 14, 2005 at 11:00:45PM +1000, Hamish Moffatt wrote: > On Thu, Apr 14, 2005 at 09:55:12AM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote: > > On Thu, Apr 14, 2005 at 03:37:02PM +1000, Hamish Moffatt wrote: > > > You wrote 'specification', I wrote 'standards documents'. > > > > I call things by their real names. A 'standards document' is a > > specification promoted by a self-proclaimed 'standards body'. The > > Good for you. I note that you completely failed to address the rest of > my message.
Having refuted the assumptions, the rest of your argument collapsed (it was basically a variation on special pleading, "this stuff doesn't need to be free because the people who wrote it are special"). I didn't consider it necessary to go through line-by-line and point this out. > > It's just more documentation. Free software needs *free* documentation. > > Assuming I agree, what's that got to do with standards documents > (or specifications, if you like)? RFCs, for example, describe > protocols which is not software. They're just documentation for software. When the software is modified, they need to be updated to match it. Some arbitrary fluff document about "the specification of fooTP" is not interesting. What matters is "the specification of the protocol served by apache". If it wasn't the protocol served by apache and friends, nobody would care about the document. There is absolutely no reason why I shouldn't take a copy of apache and modify it a bit to create another, incompatible protocol for it to serve, that suits some purpose I have, assuming this purpose doesn't involve compatibility with existing HTTP clients. Lots of new protocols are created in this manner. There is no justification for saying that I shouldn't be able to modify the documentation, which includes the IETF's HTTP spec, to reflect this. A reasonable approach would be to change every instance of 'HTTP' in the protocol and spec, strip off the IETF headers and footers, and go from there. You are saying that this should be prohibited, for no appreciable reason. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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