No substantive changes suggested, merely matters of style.... [Anthony Towns] > (0) Summary > > Within the Debian community there has been a significant amount of > concern about the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), and whether > it is, in fact, a "free" license. This document attempts to explain > why Debian's answer is "no". As Russ said, it's best to clarify here that you mean the GFDL 1.2. > license, one of the consequences of this is that it is not possible to > include content from a documention directly into "a documention"? Perhaps "...from documentation". > that, once included, may not be modified or removed from the documentation > in future. "in the future", clearer. > suitable for editing). In particular, Section 3 of the GFDL requires > that a transparent copy of the documentation be included with every > opaque copy distributed, or that a transparent copy is made available Subjunctive police - "copy be made available". You got it right earlier in the same sentence. (: > In practice, then, documentation simply isn't different enough to > warrant different standards: we still wish to provide source code in "different standards of freedoms we expect for our users" - that is, I think this point is strong enough to be worth stating more forcefully. This seems to be the one major issue that separates Debian from the FSF: I believe they already concede that the GFDL is not a free *software* license. It also seems to be the point most often contested in the GFDL debates. (Well, alongside the perennially popular non- argument, "What?!? You dare call a FSF license non-free? Heresy!") > An easy first step is to not include the optional invariant sections in > your documentation, since they are not required by the license, but are > simply an option open to authors. Probably should enumerate the types of invariant sections here - cover texts in particular, and maybe dedications too. (Are those considered bad? since they are removable.) > I've put the above draft on the wiki [3] so people can tweak it. > [3] http://wiki.debian.org/GFDLPositionStatement Since this has already been seconded as-is here, I thought it best to comment here instead of making random unauthorised edits to a wiki. Even so, I'd second this if I were a Debian developer. Thanks for the GR, AJ, Peter
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