Re: A possible GFDL compromise
On Mon, 25 Aug 2003, David Starner wrote:
>Fedor Zuev <fedor@earth.crust.irk.ru> writes:
>> But if you take Acrobat, remove, say, the Adobe EULA, and
>> distribute the rest, it will be censorship or, at least, very
>> similar. Because you conceal from users the information from
>> creator, that they reasonable expect to receive from you. Against
>> the will both the user and creator.
>First, let's be honest here. The number of users who will be
>annoyed by the wasted disk space probably outnumber the number of
>users who want the GNU manifesto attached to every GNU manual. It
>is in the nature of users to be pragmatic. The number of users who
>really want to see the Adobe EULA is much lower. Furthermore, the
>Adobe EULA, being a license document, is moot.
I do not say, that users want to read Manifesto or Adobe
EULA. I say that they can reasonable expect to receive it from you.
There may be reasons for this, other than pleasure of reading.
May be user will decide not to use Emacs at all, if he will
know, that Emacs and Manifesto written by the same man. (Btw, this
if a far more usual and far more honest behavior, than strip
Manifesto and continue to use it)
May be user will avoid lawsuit, if he will be aware about
ridiculous interpretation of law by Adobe.
>Taken to the extreme, a program which happens to search through
>your files for porn and emails it back to the upstream is
>performance art, and therefore should not be touched. More classic
>free speech would be a program that pops up a box if you run it on
>a non-free system and reads to you the GNU manifesto before letting
>you do anything. Would we tolerate that as free software? I sure
>wouldn't.
>If an author wants to tack his lecture onto his free manual for free
>software, I expect the same rights, to delete the annoying and
space-wasting parts. More importantly, what happens when Joe Bob's
>pop-mail 0.1 becomes ESR's fetchmail 179.3? Free software means
>that can happen; but your definition won't let that happen for free
>documentation, because Joe Bob hated guns and put a thirty page
>manifesto to that effect in his 'free' documentation, making it
>unusable for ESR's fetchmail. I guess ESR could toss in a thirty
>page manifest about how guns are good, but I'd rather not see a
>flame war in my manual.
>That is the nature of free software and free documentation, to put
>Debian under our control, to let things go beyond one solitary
>point of control and one opinion.
According to my understanding of your words, all that a bit
stricter than public domain is not free. And even a bit of
discrimination toward proprietary OS makes software non-free. Right?
Please excuse me, but I do not believe that "let things go
beyond one solitary point of control and one opinion" is the
official position of any free software organisation and,
particularly, the Debian Project.
Any definition of free software I read about, including
DFSG, was not declaration of total nihilizm, but carefully selected
set of _specific_ freedoms, and say nothing abous control or absense
of control. You may believe that any fixed set of specific freedoms
insufficient to feel youself free. But, please, do not call this a
"nature of free software and free documentation". It is not.
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