Your message repeated over and over that you think the GFDL isn't
free, but didn't even try to justify that claim. I continue to
believe that the GNU FDL is a free documentation license.
The key question is: is the FSF prepared to abandon its use of
non-free licenses for manuals?
That qu
I investigated the situation with the GDB manual. It has two
invariant sections, entitled Free Software and Free Software Needs
Free Documentation. Both sections are secondary.
> I hope Debian won't adopt your views, but if it does, it won't be the
> first disagreement between Debian and the FSF. Debian wrote its own
> definition of free software which is different from ours. We also
> disagree about Debian's practice of distributing and recommending
> I investigated the situation with the GDB manual. It has two
> invariant sections, entitled Free Software and Free Software Needs
> Free Documentation. Both sections are secondary.
That doesn't make the issue go away.
It addresses the issue that was raised here before.
Someone
When people think that invariant sections cause a practical problem,
they tend to be overlooking something--either the scenario is
unrealistic anyway, or the problem can be solved.
> When we make decisions in the GNU Project about what counts as free
> software, or free documentation, they
But in more practical terms even, political speech is very functional
-- it's meant to persuade and educate. By the same token it can have
bugs (typos or poor phraseology), malware (screeds advocating racism,
or encouraging people to kill themselves), and can be improved and/or
Many examples have been given for why this is *false*, and they're
pretty much all tied to the *non-removability* rather than the
non-modifiability. Should we repeat them again?
I've looked at these reasons, and they did not convince me the first
time; repeating them won't convince
But what if I encounter an Invariant Section saying that Social
Security is wrong and that old or diseased people should be left alone
and not helped by a public service? If I cannot remove this political
statement, I cannot really regard the manual as free. And I would not
want
A number of people have posted long lists of supposed reasons why the
GFDL is not a free license. I have not seen one that is valid, but I
cannot comment on each point. It takes longer to refute an attack
than to make one, and the critics outnumber me. Even supposing I
could afford to spend full
But why, if you found the old BSD license to be so inconvenient, are you
promoting a license which mandates even greater inconveniences upon the
end user?
I think you make the inconvenience out as more than it is. To have an
invariant sections piled on in large quantities is a hypothe
The Wikipedia used the GFDL because it was recommended by the FSF.
They used it in its natural way. And then they got burnt.
I fetched those pages, anxious that they might have had a serious
problem, but when I saw the contents I was relieved. They were just
discussing whether they are b
Then, I would like you to explain why you think a document with
invariant sections is free for the GNU definition of freedom, instead of
repeating around and around you are not convinced by our arguments.
The reason I have said that a few times is that I have seen various
messages here
> A political essay is (typically) written by certain persons to
> persuade the public of a certain position. If it is modified,
> it does not do its job. So it makes sense, socially, to say
> that these cannot be modified.
Then, why are there so many political essays under t
Perhaps the best thing to do is contact someone from the Wikipedia and
ask them to summarize the situation in a mail to RMS, and relate to him
whether or not they felt "burnt", or perceived a threat of inconvenience
large enough to cripple their project.
They can do that if they wa
Unfortunately, other people purporting to act on behalf of the FSF do.
Did they really claim to be speaking for the FSF, or were they just
expressing support for the FSF? Anyone can do the latter, but we did
not ask anyone to speak for the FSF about this issue on this list.
(Meanwhile,
Of course, both the FSF and Debian regard the BSD advertising clause as
an inconvenience, not as grounds for ruling the license to be non-free;
so while RMS's reasoning may be to some degree inconsistent here
(advocating against one inconvenient license and for another),
This isn't
At least one situation comes to mind where it might happen: If I wanted
to publish a collection of HOWTOs, e.g., from the LDP. If every one of
them included front and back cover texts, that'd be a mountain.
There is no difficulty at all here. This collection would be an
aggregate, a
In order to just remove it, technically speaking they needed
permission from EVERY SINGLE CONTRIBUTOR,
That's the same as the situation for any change between licenses. For
instance, if Apache wanted to relicense under the GPL, they would need
permission from EVERY SINGLE CONTRIBUTOR. Th
> (Meanwhile, messages regarding the perceived problems have generally
> been ignored outright. Even messages asking for clarification: "It
> looks to me like the FDL prohibits this.
>
> Depending on where and how you sent them, that might or might not
> indi
Let me point out that just as Debian doesn't get to demand that the
GFDL be changed, so also the FSF does not have a role in determining
the interpretation of Debian's standards.
We all recognize this; I acknowledged it explicitly here a few days
ago.
Have you simply ignored the explanations...
An insulting question like that doesn't deserve a response,
but I will answer anyway.
I've looked at the problems people have reported. Many of them are
misunderstandings (what they believe is not allowed actually is
allowed), many of these cases h
> Whether to change the GFDL is not a Debian decision, so I've decided
> not to discuss that here.
Is there a public forum where you are willing to discuss that?
Not now, and not in the way that some people want to discuss it
(they throw stones at me while I stand there and get hit).
You still haven't answered two questions put to you publicly,
You are trying to demand the kind of discussion which I've decided not
to participate in--one that resembles a cross-examination. But this
is not a court, not a cross-examination. You decide what to say, and
so do I. I won't alwa
A number of people have raised issues about the GFDL that pertain to
converting documentation into software and vice versa. They call for
software and documentation to be a single pool of material with
compatible licenses.
That goal goes way beyond what I aimed for when writing our licenses.
I wr
GPL 3 is not at the stage to ask for public comments.
Can someone remind me how exactly the license above is incompatible with
the GNU GPL?
Each one is a copyleft. The GPL says the combined work must be under
the GPL. The simple license says the combined work must be under that
license. Both cannot be true at once.
I look forward to read a draft of the GPL v3, since Hans Reiser did
mention that the equivalent of 'Invariant Sections' would be added
in the forthcoming GPL v3.
Reiser's statement was inaccurate. For GPL version 3 we are
considering requirements for preserving certain limited author
That was one question. The other, and more important, question was:
"Do you happen to have any idea as to how much time will be given for
community review?"
Please remember that this is not a cross examination; you are free
to ask questions, but how and whether I respond to them is m
The Secure Mailer license you sent me is quite different from the
Jikes license. They share a major problem, though. If someone makes
an accusation that the software infringes a patent, IBM can force you
to fold and stop using the program.
This means that neither Jikes nor Secure Mailer is free
... A combined work would have a shared Copyright
and still be under the GNU GPL which would prevent Troll Tech from
releasing the combined work under other licensing terms.
This would almost certainly cause a rift to develop between their
Professional Edition and their Free
programme should not be in the Debian packages, unless Debian officially
grants Qt the 'system library status' to use the respective exception
clause in the GPL.
There is no such thing as "system library status" in the GPL. That's
a misunderstanding of a certain paragraph in the GPL,
The Debian project
is huge now, we are finding that some mirrors are mirroring only part of
the distribution, often just the binaries for certain architectures
because they just don't have that many gigabytes of HD space. It could
be argued that you can still get the source "
Troll Tech's stated goal is to be compatible with all of these licenses
which meet the Open Source Definition (and because of the origins of that
document, the Debian Free Software Guidelines).
If that is the goal, they definitely need to change the license.
The present QPL does not me
Modifications to QT May be licensed as QPL or GPL or Both. However
only those modifications which include a QPL license, or GPL+QPL
License will be in the official QT since both the Free and
professional
editions must be the same.
I think this is a good approach. Mo
> 1. Some Sun lawyer was overzealous.
> 2. Sun is making a serious attempt to revive interface copyright.
How did you arrive at this conclusion?
It was Ean's conclusion. I don't know what Sun is actually doing.
I read it as putting the
Yes. I asked Wietse about it some weeks ago and I understood from his
reply that he is trying to change it.
I've been speaking with some of them and encouraging them too; I'm
glad that Debian folk are also helping. I believe that the developers
in IBM are sincerely trying to solve this pr
There would appear to be a contradiction between section 2.0, and the
above COPYRIGHT.images statement, although I am not sure. I have never
really understood just how graphics files, which are free standing
components, are covered by the GPL.
By "free-standing", do you mean that
In fact Linus has given blanket permission for anything which is linked
with the kernel dynamically (ie applications, libraries, kernel modules)
to not be under the GPL.
In the GNU/Linux system, applications and libraries are not linked
with the kernel--not statically, and not dynamica
It looks like that version of ssh really was free software.
I am surprised.
Does the GPL allow redistribution of deriviate works under
a license with a "rename if certain changes are made" clause?
No, it does not. However, it might be worth while for us to
make a specific exception to permit linking GMP with that code.
The benefits could be great, and the situati
> Does the GPL allow redistribution of deriviate works under
> a license with a "rename if certain changes are made" clause?
>=20
> No, it does not.
Out of curiosity, why not?
Because it is a restriction that is not in the GPL.
It therefore conflicts with the GPL's req
> > The GPL requires that you include prominent notices stating that you
> > changed the files (and the date of any changes).
>
> Yes, but it allows me to choose which form of prominent notice I use.
Not explicitly.
The GPL requires you to mark modified versions as modified,
> However, it occurs to me that there may be a way around this. It
> seems to me that once you make a modified version and rename it, the
> requirement is exhausted. Further modifications will not require
> repeated renamings.
Ingenious. However, to be on the safe side we'd p
> But the frontend actually has to be linked to GCC.
What front-end is this? I know nothing about it as yet.
If the GPL is being violated for GCC, the FSF needs to take action.
But we need to know the facts first.
Would someone please send me a description of the situation?
> Does RMS know about this ? I suspect that RMS would take a similar
> view in this case.
Yes, he knows about this. He was not amused, but the fact that the
frontend to M3 was XFree-style licensed probably helped a little bit.
I don't remember anything about this case; perhaps I
The DEC Modula 3 compiler, and its descenedents, like the Polytechnique
Modula 3 compiler.
I vaguely remember that this program was non-free and worked with GCC
in some way, but I don't remember the details. I knew more about it
once upon a time, and if I thought at the time that there w
I sent these two messages to Ian. I am sending them to him through
this list, because mail I send him directly always bounces.
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 21:32:27 -0700 (MST)
From: Richard Stallman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
In-reply-to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (message from
IMPORTANT: READ CAREFULLY THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THE FOLLOWING
AGREEMENT ("LICENSE") BEFORE DOWNLOADING THE
PRODUCT. BY CLICKING "ACCEPT" BELOW:
1.YOU CERTIFY THAT YOU ARE NOT A MINOR AND THAT YOU AGREE TO BE
BOUND BY ALL OF THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS SET OUT IN THE LICENSE
I looked at the web page you sent me. It does not seem to violate
the GPL as regards the GPL-covered programs included in it,
although there are some subtle issues I haven't yet figured out.
It does say that some non-free programs are included in the system.
The tendency (which did not start her
What bothers me with Corel is not them using Debian, but rather they fact
that
they gave nothing back to us or the community. Not code, time, or money.
What Corel-written programs are in the distribution, and what are
their licenses? Are any of them free software?
What the world needs now is a slick, idiot-friendly Linux distribution
If you could please call it a "GNU/Linux" distribution, that would
help us call the users' attention to the issues that are at stake.
Putting GPL-covered programs together with non-free programs in a
collection such as an operating system does not violate the GPL, and
Corel is not the first to do this. I think this is a harmful practice,
and that even Debian goes too far in this direction, but there is no
use singling out Corel
I'm including the full text below. What I find particularly odious is
not the exclusion of minors (though it is odious), but the contention (as
usual in purported EULAs) that Corel still retains title to the copy of
the software downloaded, whether it's under GPL or not.
That c
infolved did bring up my original objection---that removing the suggests
will make it harder for people to find things like "gimp-nonfree" (which
is IMO badly named considering that the contents of the package are
completely free--unless you live in the drain-bamaged US where LZW is
you can not sublicense, mix with non-free code neither by libs nor corba
If copyright does consider this a single combined work,
then the GPL itself has this consequence.
If copyright law does not consider "combining with CORBA" to make a
single combined work, then a copyright-based license c
The highest priority task I see now is a web-browser deserving its name.
I agree. What do people think of the W3C's browser as a starting point?
What does it mean to make a new GNU/Linux distro that is more
user-friendly and entirely free? How would it differ from Debian?
It seems to me it would differ in two ways:
1. It is entirely free. You could achieve this starting with Debian
by eliminating the non-free and contrib categories (the
You may license what end-user will do with the code however you want.
I think you have been misinformed. This cannot legally be done in the
US under copyright law (except, since one year ago, in programs with
license managers whose source is not available).
If you could do impose such restri
I thought rather about a set of tools that put together will make
a web browser. This will be :
That sounds like the Unix design approach. I tend to think that this
approach would be more work, and would result in something not as easy
to use.
Part I dont know how will be done is jav
Yes, indeed, and Kudos to Arphic and also to CLE, the Chinese Linux
Extension Team in Taiwan
Can you tell me how to contact this team? I would like to talk with
them, and explain to them that what they are extending is the GNU
system, not Linux. This work has nothing to do with Linux at
The CLE
Team had indeed contemplated a lawsuit against Tatung if Tatung continues to
be irresponsible.
That is ultimately what you have to do.
Now that you are here, if you have time, I wonder if you
can help them out negotiating with Tatung, and more importantly, to uphold
In my opinion, they are indeed extending the "Linux", although not just
Linux, as you correctly stated.
You're extending the operating system in which Linux is used.
But this operating system is not Linux. Linux is the kernel.
The kernel is an important part of the system, but a kernel i
I am talking with someone at Digital about this problem.
However, it would not do any harm to stop distributing these packages.
Could someone take a look at what CM3 is actually doing
with the code that is linked into GCC? They may be violating the
GPL in ways that have nothing to do with what Digital did.
Jeff Bailey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> is working on a new mailer and is
interested in making it serve as a PINE replacement that would satisfy
PINE users. He would like to get advice and help from someone very
familiar with PINE. If you can help, would you please contact him?
Why not just hack a pine-style main menu, configuration screen, imap, and
keyboard cheat-sheet onto mutt. They've already got a config file floating
around that makes it emulate all the PINE keystrokes, and it's already a
fully functional mailer.
If PINE users are happy to switch t
The RHTVision library source code is based from the source code of
the
Turbo Vision library made long time ago by Borland Corporation, now
Inprise.
Unfortunately, Turbo Vision is not free software. The things Borland
has said about Turbo Vision are somewhat contradictory, but
The Open Publication License is a reasonable starting point for a
license, but the last version I saw had a serious (though not fatal)
problem: it has two optional clauses, and if either of these options
is invoked, then the license becomes non-free. So if you write
something based on the Open Pub
I agree that different kinds of licenses are appropriate for different
kinds of works. I am writing the GNU Free Documentation License for
documentation--that is, for manuals. It is also a good license for
any sort of textbook. For some kinds of works, such as fiction,
permitting just verbatim c
I think it may be possible to extend the DFSG[2] a little bit to permit
information under RMS's libertarian license-in-development,
I don't know of any conflict between any license I am developing and
the DFSG; if you think there is one, could you please tell me the
specifics?
PS: Please
How does one objectively evaluate whether a software application, say a
game for example, fulfills it's intended purpose? Sure there are some
quantifiable performance and capacity criteria you might apply, but
those are only a component of the purpose of the program.
I agree comple
We have also read much about license proliferation and the confusion a
person might feel when they see, on Freshmeat or somewhere else, a license
listed as "OPL." Is that with no clauses? One or both clauses? rms is right
in saying that we need different kinds of licenses for differ
I don't object to options in licenses just as a matter of principle.
But if some of the options make a license unacceptable, then I would
not recommend that license at all--because recommending it could
easily led people to see and use the bad options.
Suppose one wanted to combine
two r
As I understand your proposed license, it has no problems falling within
the existing DFSG. This is not true for some of the others; whether Debian
wants to extend its penumbra in the manner I described is something that
will have to be extensively discussed. I'd certainly like yo
Do you believe it is inconsistent with the philosophy of the Free Software
movement to accept any more restrictions on classes of computer-handled data
that are not executable code than we do on executable code?
I think the moral requirements for freedom depend on the kind of data
or w
Around 1989, NeXT wanted to release the Objective C front end as just
object files, and tell the user to link them with GCC. Since this
would clearly be against the goal of the GPL, I asked our lawyer
whether we had grounds to object. He said that what NeXT proposed to
do would be tantamount to d
Having options in a license can be a reasonable idea, as long as all
the options are basically acceptable for the same range of works.
But if we want to recommend the license for manuals, but certain
options make the license too restrictive for manuals, that is asking
for trouble. If we recommend
I believe clause 3 is compatible with the GPL, because the GPL has a
stricter requirement.
Clauses 4 and 5 are incompatible with the GPL because they are stated
as conditions of the license for the copyright. If similar
requirements were based on the publicity right (which exists in
certain juri
I believe that you can distribute a program under the GNU General Public
License and a seperate Trademark license. That is what AbiSource does with
AbiWord. And I don't think it restricts the freedom of the user since it
is still allowed to distribute derived works.
I agree.
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