Re: Non Program Freeness
Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 03, 1999 at 02:09:44PM -0800, Joey Hess wrote:
> > So what do you plan to do if there is a bug in this non-modifiable item you
> > have placed in the main distribution? (And yes, documentation, and even
> > artwork, can have bugs in it (ie: "this documentation says rm -rf / is a
> > good thing", "this icon uses 1024 colors too many")).
>
> Then we either say "This document is so crappy, it's not worth the effort
> to maintain", or "This document is so *good* in other areas that we *have*
> to make it available, but we might add a note about the rm thing anyway".
You can't modify the document, so you can't add a note. You could annotate
the document in another file, but what if the user missed the annotatons?
> Consider the packages:
> emacs20 (files in /usr/doc/emacs20/etc are often distributable
> but not modifiable, including WHY-FREE)
This amazes me since I thought RMS had the same opinion I have WRT free
documentation.
> debian-policy (the FSSTND has distribution-only terms for the
> general public)
>
> doc-linux-* (I *believe* some of the HOWTOs in this package are
> under distribute-only terms. I'm not sure however)
Debian has a long history of taking the right stance on freeness, refusing
to compromise, and causing non-free things to become free. I suspect that if
we do not compromise the primciples debian was founded on, and we remove
these non-free items from the disttribution, it will contribute to them
being made free in the future.
--
see shy jo
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