Sylvain Beucler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Thank you for your reply. I am confused by the following:
> IMHO a secondary section cannot be that easily by-passed, but indeed > I'm not a lawyer. Please would you explain how you feel the FDL prevents a secondary section that denies climate change? If you are not lawyerly, is there one on savannah-hackers? Many GNU manuals have misapplied FDL so far, including things such as designating the licence as an invariant section (thereby disabling the upgrade clause) or designating technical sections as invariant (GDB). > Also don't confuse preventing addition of 'global > warming' statements in derivates versions and accepting such changes > in a project manual. I'm not aware that any of us are doing that. It is little comfort that we are not forced to accept lies into our source if someone makes a heavily-enhanced version of our work expressing views that odious, or worse (National Front?). We cannot compete with that version on the same terms unless we repeat their lies. > Similarly we would like Texinfo documents at Savannah to be compatible > with the GNU manuals. This is something we can't achieve if we accept > GNU GPL manuals. We do not impose a particular license, just > compatibility, and we'd rather have people release such manuals under > _at least_ the GFDL rather than not being able to reuse them at > all. We also require the GFDL'd documents to be version 1.2 or any > later version so that any issue that can be found in the current > version of this license will be fixed with the next one. This looks like a bug in GNU, not in free software itself. The obvious solution would seem to be to relicense the GNU manuals under the GPL, but I assume that's not on offer yet. A work under the FDL is incompatible with any free software licence because it is an adware licence. If you seek just compatibility, please select a free software licence that is compatible with the FDL (so, non-copyleft) and use that in the recommendation or requirement. However, not all licences are as good as the GPL when it comes to adaptability to non-program software and some authors strongly prefer copyleft. > In this regard, I asked what is the preferred way to send concerns > about the GFDL in general. [EMAIL PROTECTED] would be glad to receive > comments and use them for work on GFDL revision 3. Most of these comments have been made for over 5 years now! I have been told that there is a new draft of the FDL ready for publication. Please publish it, so we can comment topically. > DRM criticism about > the GNU GPLv3 draft would probably also be useful in this aim. The GPLv3 process is rather closed and difficult to access, so I cannot comment at present. I am discussing this with its webmasters, but I am frustrated that you direct me to a process that I cannot access myself. > This is not about accepting a non-free license (the GFDL is a free > documentation license), and this is not about rejecting free software > at Savannah (we already do so by rejecting ASL'd software - until GNU > GPLv3 is out, that is :)). The FDL is not a free software licence and there is no agreed meaning of "free documentation". Savannah is a project of the Free Software Foundation. Please support free software. The best way is to recommend projects to be 100% free software, and not require FDL use. Best wishes, -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/ Please follow http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct
