Re: Should our documentation be free? (Was Re: Inconsistencies in our approach)
On Sun, 2003-08-10 at 16:32, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> Sergey V. Spiridonov wrote:
>
> >There are cases, when we can easely distinguish, is it documentation or
> >program. For example, emacs info files are definitely documentation.
>
> And what if a user wishes to link documentation into code? Do you
> believe that it is acceptable to ship content within Debian that may
> never be included in a piece of code that Debian could ship?
If the licence forbid linking with any code, no (I think we could tie
this into discrimination against what is to us an important field of
endeavour: computer programming).
If the licence was otherwise free and merely incompatible with a
particular piece of code, fine. Perhaps stupid but still DFSG-free. Many
pieces of code that cannot be legally combined are shipped with Debian.
> We've established that there are cases where someone may legitimately wish to
> use documentation within code, but so far we haven't established why the
> proponents of the "Debian Free Documentation Guidelines" feel that it's
> acceptable to make this impossible.
The proponents haven't even even begun to establish a plausible case for
these new guidelines and it will all fizzle out before they achieve the
impossible. Just be amused to see them argue about whether X written in
a literate programming style is code, documentation or both and how the
rules for transitions from code to documentation and documentation to
code should be handled.
In the meantime I'll be content with the definition of software that
WordNet (r) 1.7.1 (July 2002) provides:
n : (computer science) written programs or procedures or rules
and associated documentation pertaining to the operation
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
of a computer system and that are stored in read/write
memory; "the market for software is expected to expand"
syn: software system, software package, package
ant: hardware
Regards,
Adam
PS: Would it be possible to release code and Debian binaries solely
under the GFDL? If no, does this discriminate against the endeavour of
computer programming?
PPS: Does anyone know of GFDL-licensed documentation that contains
significant verbatim quotations of GPLed code? As an idea this GPL code
has been taken from Emacs:
http://www.gnu.org/manual/elisp-manual-21-2.8/html_node/elisp_350.html
About 140 lines of code have been copied from a 207 line file. We know
the licences are incompatible. Is this OK without the Free Software
Foundation explicitly dual licensing the code? (I'd say yes this is OK
because all the code is assigned to them so they can do what they like,
while still maintaining that we can't do the same).
This at least demonstrates that the situation is unworkable without
being in the privileged position of owning all copyrights. If the FSF
tried to argue that one could quote this amount of code without the work
becoming a derivate work then I suspect FSF header files would become
fair game.
Reply to: