On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 12:24:47PM +0100, Nic James Ferrier wrote:
> "Michael Marsh" <michael.a.marsh@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > On 5/30/07, Max Hyre <max@hyre.net> wrote:
> >> You're not allowed to change or discard that lump. Isn't it at least
> >> *understandable* that many believe this document is unfree?
> >
> > Given one particular invariant section that always appears in FSF/GNU
> > GFDL'ed documentation, my preferred analogy is, "You can't skip the
> > commercials."
>
> To be clear about this:
>
> I do not object to Debian organizing itself how it sees fit. I am not
> a Debian developer; I may never be a Debian developer.
>
> This is how the Debian process dealt with the issue:
>
> http://www.debian.org/vote/2006/vote_001
>
> and I respect that.
>
> BUT I find it absolutely astounding that people think that this vote
> is a basis for going round removing documentation without providing an
> alternative.
"An alternative"? Re-writing the Emacs manual (IIRC this was the
sticking point early on in this thread) is not an easy task. At the
very least I would expect this to take some time. In the mean time, the
maintainer(s) still had to follow the DFSG and whatnot, so I cannot see
what choice they had...
> And, to remove GNU documentation from Emacs is tantamount to
> vandalism. It would be better to move the whole package to non-free
> rather than remove the documentation. It's such an insane thing to do.
I can see your point - although my wording would have been somewhat less
radical. Separating the software and documentation is not a good thing.
But, alas, they were under different licences to start with :-|
I think your anger is misdirected - Debian behaves exactly as promised:
The DFSG rules. And moving the emacs documentation to non-free was a
logical consequence of it.
> Of course... if lots of packages are moved to non-free I might as well
> use ubuntu. I've never had to use non-free before.
Obviously you're free to do so. After all, Ubuntu isn't bound by the
DFSG, but something uncannily similar:
http://www.ubuntu.com/community/ubuntustory/licensing
Regards
--
Karl E. Jorgensen
karl@jorgensen.org.uk http://www.jorgensen.org.uk/
karl@jorgensen.com http://karl.jorgensen.com
==== Today's fortune:
Parallel lines never meet, unless you bend one or both of them.
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