On Fri, 2002-11-15 at 11:44, Simon Richter wrote:
> Martin,
>
> On Wed, Nov 13, 2002 at 11:30:23AM +0100, Martin Wuertele wrote:
> > So how about a set of Debian Free Documentation Guidelines in addition
> > to the DFSG? Documentation is not Software and thus imo different rules
> > apply to them. Imo for a docs it is enough if it is allowed to be
> > redistributed and quoted while restricting modification is not
> > necessary. Docs available for free redistribution and quoting do provide
> > more freedom than commercial docs and this imo needs to be taken into
> > account.
>
> No, that is too loose.
>
> How about something along the lines of
>
> ...
> 2) Reformatting and Format Conversion: The license must permit
> reformatting and conversion to different file formats, as long as the
> contents of the documents themselves are not changed by this.
I spent about two weeks trying to codify this into a documentation
license a while back (around two GFDL flamewars ago?). I don't think
there's a satisfactory way to make this requirement. Some fileformats
have easy isomorphic transforms (any combinations of XML and SGML).
However, most don't. PDF to text? DocBook to troff? 8859-1 to ASCII?
There's major lossage involved in all of those format conversions, to
the point where you must change the content. In some cases (say, Quark
to LaTeX) the structures are so incredibly different that I don't see
how you can argue that any conversion between the two is just a
"reformatting".
--
- Joe Wreschnig <piman@sacredchao.net> - http://www.sacredchao.net
"What I did was justified because I had a policy of my own... It's
okay to be different, to not conform to society."
-- Chen Kenichi, Iron Chef Chinese
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