Re: Results for Debian's Position on the GFDL

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org>]

On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 10:34:16PM -0500, Raul Miller wrote:
> On 3/13/06, Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org> wrote:
> > Debian has labelled a license with serious, onerous practical problems free.
> 
> Oh?
> 
> I find myself quite uncertain as to what it is that you're talking about.
> 
> I see two issues mentioned in other messages, the DRM issue (the
> "technical measures" clause), and the Opaque issue.
> 
> Are those what you are talking about?  Or are there other problems?

Those are the big, simple ones.  Some other problems that have come up in
the past:

It requires preserving any section titled "History", required adding it
if it's not there, and requires adding stuff to it.  It doesn't seem
clear what "preserve" means, however.  If it means that History is an
append-only-invariant-section, it seems like *all* GFDL documents contain
an unmodifiable section.  I'm not sure, though: it says "preserve", but
not "preserve, unaltered in their text", as it does for Invariant Sections,
and "preserve" alone is not defined.

It prohibits modifying several section titles.  It gives a prescribed
method for translation that's likely to be inappropriate and awkward.
It prevents labelling sections "History" or "Endorsements" if they're,
say, talking about the history of the topic (and not the history of the
work) and disucssing endorsements rather than giving them.  It requires
maintaining dedications, even when inappropriate; if I use a page from
your work, I have to preserve "Dedicated to Raul's dad".  It requires
adding an "appropriate copyright notice for your modifications"; I don't
know what that means, if I've placed my modifications into the public
domain, or if my modifications come from a third-party public domain
source.

The "identify you as the publisher" bit seems to fail the Dissident
test; at least on a natural reading (perhaps not a legal one), that
seems to prohibit using an alias.  "equally prominent and visible" seems
to prohibit stylization; preventing me from publishing a modified
version with a cool stylized title page seems like a patent violation
of DFSG#3 to me.  (I have no idea what the *purpose* of that restriction
is--it's not like the title can't be changed; on the contrary, 4a mandates
changing it.)

The degree of some of these problems is debatable (none of this is new),
but in sum, I can't honestly call this "free".  What bothers me almost
as much is that I havn't seen cohesive responses to these or other problems.
I can deal with rational disagreement: "this is why we don't think this
restriction is a problem"--but we don't seem to have that.  Instead, we've
been handed down the result, and we're expected to use IK or something to
force-fit the DFSG to reach the desired outcome.

-- 
Glenn Maynard