Re: Documentation and Sarge's Release Critical Policy

[Jérôme Marant <jmarant@free.fr>]

Quoting Stephen Stafford <ssta@pol.ac.uk>:

> On Mon, Aug 25, 2003 at 11:11:14AM +0200, J?r?me Marant wrote:
> > 
> > Let's play fair now:
> > 
> > >From WordNet (r) 1.7 :
> > 
> >   software
> >        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"
> > 
> > I do not consider those files are "associated documentation". They
> > do not document the program they come with, unlike the manual.
> > 
> 
> If the files are not "associated" then why are they THERE?  If they are not

If they'd be out of the scope of DFSG, why would we care of them being
there or not? I see nothing wrong in distributing Free Software
advocacy.

> associated, we can remove them.  The license means we can NOT remove them,
> therefore, they are associated and are non-free.  (or are you going to claim

No, we can remove them.

> that a "verbatim copying only" license is Free?)

I claim that a speech is not software documentation and shall not be
considered as such. You shall not modify someone speech, you shall
not cut some part of someone's speech and tell everyone that you
wrote it, and so on.
There are limits everywhere in everyone's freedom.

> > 
> > No, qmail is non-free software and would not go into Debian.
> 
> Considering we HAVE to include these non-free components, then neither is
> emacs free.

Again, keeping those files in Emacs doesn't make Debian less free, because
they neither programs nor documentation so out of the scope of DFSG.

-- 
Jérôme Marant