Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
Georg C. F. Greve <greve@gnu.org> wrote:
> Especially the GPL is striking a new balance between the rights of the
> author and the freedoms of the users that puts both above the wishes
> of middlemen.
>
> The GFDL deeks to do the same thing. Only this time you find yourself
> in the position of middleman and have to take care to not violate the
> rights of either party.
Quite the opposite actually. Any redistributor can add invariant
sections which makes sharing difficult.
When you release code under the GPL, you're sure that contributors must
distribute their work under the same license. So if they did
interesting work in the derived work you can merge it back into the
original as long as you add their name to the Copyright.
Now you release the documentation under the GFDL without any invariant
sections. A contributor releases an extended version of the docs but
includes a long rant as an invariant section. You can't merge the work
back in without including the long rant verbatim. This doesn't protect
the original author nor the end users very well.
--
Peter S. Galbraith, Debian Developer <psg@debian.org>
http://people.debian.org/~psg
GPG key 1024/D2A913A1 - 97CE 866F F579 96EE 6E68 8170 35FF 799E
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