Re: various opinions on Debian vs the GFDL

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit Mark Rafn <dagon@dagon.net>

> Does anyone feel that their opinion does not roughly fall into one of the
> following categories?

I think my opinion fits "well enough" within category c:

> c) The GFDL would not be free if applied to software, and is not free when
> applied to documents.  There may or may not be a distinction between the
> two, but it is unreasonable to have different standards of freedom or
> different standards of whether Debian should distribute them.

But ideally I'd have liked it to be phrased

  ?) The GFDL is not free when applied to documents if any of
     the "invariant" or "cover" options are exercised. There may
     or may not be a distinction between software and documents,
     but it makes sense in itself to require freedom of documentation,
     just as it makes sense in itself to require freedom of software.
     Freedom for documents is as important as freedom for software.

For certain kinds of documents, it can be argued convincingly that
freedom is not important. I reply that it must be because those
documents are not naturally parts of an operating system, so Debian
would lose little by moving it to non-free.


I suppose it's OK to tacitly overlook nonmodifyable license texts for
the moment.

-- 
Henning Makholm              "Det är alldeles för ansvarsfullt att skaffa en
                            flickvän. Det är ju som att skaffa en hundvalp."