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GFDL freedoms



On Wed, 2005-04-13 at 11:49 +0300, Thibaut VARENE wrote:

(I've shifted this to -project - it's not really relevant to -private)

> This is yet another interesting concept of freedom, democracy, and
> "interest of our users". For the benefit of the *very small part of
> mind-twisted people that absolutely want to distribute GFDL-ed doc in
> no other ways than those that could potentially infringe the license*,
> we would deprive the immense majority of those moderately sane people
> who just ask for some good doc along their free software, to be able
> to code at pace, distribute their code and doc in regular ways and
> focus on useful things.

We want freedom for everyone we provide software to, not just most
people we provide software to. That /is/ a fundamental part of Debian
and free software.

> I might not grasp the whole concept of it, but I'm having really hard
> time figuring out who would *need* to *distribute* *FREE*
> documentation on encrypted/DRM media, for instance.

Wikipedia is under the GFDL. It would be nice if someone could produce a
portable version of Wikipedia for the Sony PSP, except the media is
DRM-encumbered and so they probably can't. I think that's an excessive
restriction.

> Just to remind you of some obvious fact: when trying to comtempt all
> _minorities_, one usually ends up comtempting *no one*, for it is
> impossible to comtempt *everyone*.

But we *can* make people happy in this respect. It's possible for the
GFDL to achieve its goal without preventing this use case.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org



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