Re: Inconsistencies in our approach
John Goerzen wrote:
>Secondly, there are pending court cases right now in the U.S. alleging
>copyright violations from legal papers filed in court cases.
Ugh. These people should be thrown out of court. Or perhaps just
shot out of hand. ;-)
If they actually win, Debian *will* have to be *very* strict about
licensing on licenses.
>I don't see anybody forcing us to ship the GPL on our hard disks. I
>do see us required to put it there *if we distribute GPL'd software*.
>But that's the rub, isn't it? We're only required to distribute those
>invariant sections if we distribute the manual. So we're back to
>removing the GPL by the same argument that removes FDL documents.
Well, there's always my favorite difference: The GPL is one piece of
text. FDL'ed invariant sections are an arbitrary number of pieces of
arbitrary text. (This could be called the 'de minimus' argument.) I
have stated previously that I would have been happy if RMS had imposed
the current conditions on the GCC and GNU Emacs manuals, without
promoting the use of similar conditions for everyone. :-P
This also partly explains why the status of the GNU Emacs manual was
previously accepted and is not anymore. Previously, it was a one-off
special case; now it is part of a herd (hurd?) of unmodifiable
material being pushed, perversely, by the FSF. I have nothing against
special exceptions when they're appropriate, but I do have something
against general exceptions.
How about runnning up a GR to amend the Debian Social Contract to
explicitly allow the GPL? ;-) I bet it would pass. Then anyone who
wants to allow a GFDL'ed document in knows the process; propose an
amendment to the Social Contract, and see if you can get it passed. (-;
--
Nathanael Nerode <neroden at gcc.gnu.org>
http://home.twcny.rr.com/nerode/neroden/fdl.html
Reply to: