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Re: Consensus about the Academic Free License ("AFL") v3.0



On 13/06/15 06:36, Walter Landry wrote:
Ángel González<keisial@gmail.com>  wrote:
On 12/06/15 23:22, Walter Landry wrote:
I would strongly disagree here. Requiring documentation of any sort in addition to the source code is a big step. This is not a minor thing.
I don't think requiring that some documentation is provided with the
source code, makes it unfree.
Of course it does.  Mandating a minimum quality before releasing
things may be good software practice, but it is decidely unfree.  This
license prevents a certain class of modifications that, in the
original author's eyes, makes things worse.  But later people may
disagree in good faith.  For example, suppose that there is
documentation, but it is out of date to the point where it is
misleading.  This license prevents removing that misleading
documentation.  Even if you write new documentation, you have to
distribute the old documentation as well.

Cheers,
Walter Landry
I very carefully talked about requiring *some* documentation, as something opposed it to "all available documentation", which is what AFL requires and makes it problematic. Ironically, the most free program wrt this clause is one with no documentation at all.


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