Don't CC me.
On Fri, 2002-11-15 at 14:50, Simon Richter wrote:
> > 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?
>
> Loss of information doesn't imply changing contents. I used to work with
> disabled students during my community service year, and spent a lot of
> my time converting PS files full of mathematical formulae and graphics
> to text with 21 columns, using a special mathematical notation and
> braille-art :-) for the graphics.
> It was a conversion, surely information got lost,
> but I didn't change the contents,
If information was lost, you did, in fact, change the contents, from a
legal and practical perspective.
> and the authors
> of the original papers were happy that they could point to me if someone
> asked about a braille version.
Good for those authors. However, that doesn't mean that the conversion
was perfect. I'm convinced that unless we can guarantee that all
conversions are perfect, we can't formulate a legal means of ensuring
that documentation is both freely convertable to and from any formats,
and not modifiable except to change the format. You either have to place
restrictions on the formats it can be converted into (thus making it
non-free and probably obsolete about 5 years after publication), or let
people modify it to change the format (in which case, there's no real
reason you shouldn't make it truely free).
> When I'm talking about conversions, I don't necessarily mean automated
> conversions. A lot of them will require at least some manual attention
> (iso-8859-1 to ASCII has language-dependent rules for conversion, like
> German "ä -> ae" or Danish "å -> aa").
I'm familiar with these rules, too; are they actually formalized
anywhere, or have they just arisen as conventions? What about Korean (I
don't remember a Korean encoding off the top of my head) to ASCII? ISTR
that there's not even a official way to romanize Korean, let alone
transcode it.
> > 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".
>
> The end user usually does not see whether this is a Quark or LaTeX
> document, but instead, she gets some preformatted version (this is also
> true for DFSG free documentation -- most people will prefer the info
> browser or printing the PS to reading the texinfo source). So while such
> a conversion would change the structure and everything, it would only
> slightly change the end user's perception of the document -- if the
> conversion is done right and the content unchanged.
Until that end-user wanted to modify the document, in which case they'd
go to the LaTeX or Quark or DocBook or whatever source. Let's see what
happens when we apply your argument to programs:
"The end user usually does not see whether this is a C++ or Perl
program, but instead, she gets some compiled/executable version (this is
also true for DFSG free programs - most people will prefer running
binaries to reading the source)."
This is true. I've probably looked at less than 0.1% of the source code
for programs on my system, and I look at a lot of source code compared
to most users. Most non-developers have no immediate, personal use for
source code, and most developers have no use for source code that
they're not working on. Would you claim that, therefore, Debian should
include proprietary software?
> Note that this is only formulated that way to cater for standards
> (again). Since all descriptive documents (which are the majority) are
> supposed to be modifiable anyway, this clause won't apply for them, and
> you just can convert them as you wish.
IMO normative sections are the ones I'd want to modify/reuse the most,
because they contain the information pertinent to the actual standard
I'd want to extend or change.
Why are you so intent on allowing blatently non-free documentation into
Debian?
--
- 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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