Re: REVISED PROPOSAL regarding DFSG 3 and 4, licenses, and modifiable text

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit "Sunnanvind" <sunnanvind@fenderson.com>

> Sure, I could picture a more description-based criteria of what's 
> allowed; like political statements and manifests, with a disclaimer that 
> if it's obnoxiously long and generally obnoxious it may be disallowed, 
> but that has problems too.

I have a hard time imagining why especially political statements and
manifests should be OK for piggybacking onto technical documentation.

Of course there's the argument that "political statements and manifest
happens to be the invariant parts of the Emacs manual, and emacs is a
really cool program which we'd really like to distribute a good
manual for". That would even be true, even though I think RMS must
suffer from some kind of confusion of priorities when he thinks that
propaganda for freedom is more important than freedom itself.

But in that case we might as well adopt a much tighter interpretation
and then explicitly grandfather in, say, "any manual that has been
distributed for unlimited unmodified reproduction before 1/1/2002,
and updated versions of such manuals".

-- 
Henning Makholm                             "Det er du nok fandens ene om at
                                         mene. For det ligger i Australien!"