Re: Bug#207932: Consequences of moving Emacs Manuals to non-free
Sorry for coming in to this late...
Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de> wrote:
> Jérôme Marant wrote:
> > In practice I guess it's just going to mean that most people end up
> > putting non-free in their sources.list, weakening the effect of having a
> > separation between "free" and "non-free" in the first place, and more
> > users end up confused because lack of hard dependencies will mean the
> > doc packages don't get installed.
>
> That hits the nail on the head. The whole effect of these anti-GFDL
> efforts is to actually undermine Debian's position as a 100% free OS.
Or the FSF's position as distributor of "free" documentation.
Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> wrote:
> > I'm surprised there is still a misunderstanding. Debian decided that
> > invariant sections were problematic (you will find rationales
> > everywhere on debian sites). It is not Debian's fault if they do
> > exist.
>
> There is no misunderstanding. We simply think debian did something
> dumb, that will hurt it as a project.
The flip side is that this sheds some public light on the non-free
invariant sections.
-
I'm glad that we're no longer closing our eyes on this issue. The mere
fact of having incompatible licenses for Emacs and its documentation is
weird to me (even if they were both free licenses), since much of the
docs are cut and pasted between the two. When this was brought up to
RMS, he said that (1) the manual isn't written the same as the doc
strings anyway, and (2) it's a non-issue because the FSF is
copyright-holder for both works and can do want it wants. The first
reponse is clearly not always true, and the second proves the
combination is unfree to some degree when only the copyright holder can
exercise some of the changes.
Peter
Reply to: