Branden Robinson wrote: > 4. The location of the original unmodified document be > identified. > > BUG: Walter Landry has pointed out: > > "[The GNU FDL] requires me to preserve the network location of where > Transparent versions can be found for four years. Even if it is no > longer correct, and the original author can not be reached. This is > probably not uncommon. This does not raise the quality of free > documentation."[2] > I feel that this clause might be problematic in a way that clauses 1, 2, > and 3 would not be, in that the information in 1, 2, and 3 cannot become > false over time. (If a document is eventually wholly rewritten, the > "original author's" copyright no longer attaches anyway.) It's annoying, but does not really make it not free, I hope. Remember that we dealt with the FSF snail mail address changing; said address is in the GPL and is in copyright statements that point to the GPL. Many licenses and statements of copyright contain information that will become obsolete, email addresses are another good example. Anyway, this license seems to leave plenty of room for modifying the pointer to the original unmodified document. Unlike the GPL, which may or may not be modifiable (the FSF address is in the preamble, and also in the example use bit at the end, we've heard conflicting things about the preamble modification). And if all other upstream sources go away, I think the license even allows us to change the location pointer to point to packages.debian.org, where after all you can get the .orig.tar.gz. > I don't see any flagrant DFSG violations in the above license, but I > think some requests for clarification might be a good idea. So you're using "BUG" to mean "this should probably be fixed" and not "this is non-free". Ok. -- see shy jo
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