On Sun, May 25, 2003 at 01:49:07PM +1200, Adam Warner wrote: > Frankly this claim that it is "always better to keep the manual > separate"--as if it is always better to keep data separate from code--is a > shocking and nonsensical claim from someone with such a distinguished Lisp > background as yourself. I suppose for your next trick you'll claim > ignorance of what Knuth achieved with literate programming. > > Don't think you can treat us all like fools by glossing over sound > methodologies of documentation and software engineering in order to push > the mandatory inclusion of your political texts. Your message would have been better without these last two paragraphs. Please try to maintain civility with Richard. I sympathize with your frustration but acerbic remarks like this do not help to remind him that we, as a Project, are on the same side as he in most philosophical battles of relevance to Debian's mission. From a more selfish perspective, remarks like those quoted above make it easier for RMS to be unfairly dismissive of our critiques of his documentation licensing enterprise. When you offer him bait like this, he takes, while leaving more important, point-blank questions about the motivations behind the GNU FDL answered. I've asked these several times[1] and he has yet to address them at all. He just snips them out of my mails, and doesn't reply to messages at all that contain nothing else. An uncharitable interpretation of this phenomenon would be that RMS does not think the community would be supportive of the GNU FDL if he were frank about why he prefers it to the traditional GNU documentation license. However, there are other possible interpretations. [1] for example: http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200305/msg00508.html -- G. Branden Robinson | There is no housing shortage in Debian GNU/Linux | Lincoln today -- just a rumor that branden@debian.org | is put about by people who have http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | nowhere to live. -- G. L. Murfin
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