Re: Results for Debian's Position on the GFDL

[Michael Poole <mdpoole@troilus.org>]

Adam McKenna writes:

> On Fri, Mar 17, 2006 at 02:29:18PM -0500, Michael Poole wrote:
> > So is it acceptable for the GFDL to prohibit me from performing these
> > two operations:
> > 
> >   cp some-gfdl-licensed-document.txt ~/local-copy.txt
> >   chmod 0700 ~/local-copy.txt
> 
> How do those two operations prevent you from making further copies of the
> file and distributing them?

Prevent me, as the file owner?  They don't.  However, they do obstruct
or control the further reading and copying of the work.

I have sympathy with what the GFDL is trying to accomplish, but I do
not think that any of its origin, its objective or its degree of use
is a good basis to ignore drafting flaws that would lead us to declare
as non-free any other license sharing the same flaws.

Michael Poole