Re: Unidentified subject!
> The arguments appear to be:
>
> 1) There are many GFDL manuals.
> 2) The many GFDL manuals would be useful to include.
> That's two parts out of the three I mentioned, and the third part is
> crucial.
But they are an irrelevant two parts. If Joe Blow writes a license
for his program or documentation, it should get the same consideration
under the DFSG as when the FSF does.
> The DFSG doesn't directly say anything against the
> requirements of the GFDL.
Section 3 says "The license must allow modifications and derived works[...]";
if that's ambiguous in any way about everything being modifiable, a note
on section 4, talking about patch files, says "The Debian group encourages all
authors not to restrict any files, source or binary, from being modified.".
Given the license discussions over the years, I think it fairly
clear that everything must be modifiable -- your seperation of the
technical and non-technical material shows up nowhere in the DFSG.
> The GFDL allows you to make any changes you like in the technical
> substance of the manual, just as the TeX license allows you to make
> any changes you like in the technical substance of TeX.
The TeX license allows us to make any changes we like in the
user-visible version of TeX. The GFDL doesn't.
> > The DFSG says that we must have the right to modify everything, at
> > least by the use of patch files.
> I cannot find that in the DFSG.
That would be section 3, "The license must allow modifications[...]".
> This text [section 4] is specifically about
> source code for programs, and specifically about licenses that
> entirely forbid modified versions of the source code. It is extremely
> specific and narrow.
Okay, but section 4 is merely a weakening of section 3. If section 4
doesn't apply, then everything must be modifiable.
If the GFDL doesn't fail the DFSG, then neither does a manual license with
the technical parts invariant and political parts modifiable; the DFSG
simply doesn't make that distinction.
--
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