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

[tb@becket.net (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)]

Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> writes:

> On Sun, Dec 02, 2001 at 06:40:11PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> > > The GNU FDL and OPL are new licenses relative to the BSD, Artistic, and
> > > GNU GPL.  It is perfectly consistent to expect these new licenses to be
> > > used more widely in the future.  It is not reasonable to expect them to
> > > have been used before they were written.
> > 
> > However, even under the existing licenses there are lots of invariant
> > sections.
> 
> No, just the license text, except for the 4-clause BSD license, which
> has long been deprecated by Debian (and the California Regents as well).

By "existing licenses" I meant the actual licenses in actual use,
including the GNU manuals, many of which have invariant sections.  The
GFDL was written to make it easy to license new manuals the same way.

> Of the existing licenses that has come up in this discussion, only the
> OPL and GNU FDL encourage withholding the right to modify from large
> pieces of text/code written by the author.

Neither *encourages* it; and note that the GFDL explicitly does *not*
encourage it for "large pieces" of text.  And the GFDL certainly does
not talk about making code part of an invariant section *AT ALL*.

Is it now fair game for you to just spread FUD?