Re: Social Contract GR's Affect on sarge
On Wed, 28 Apr 2004 17:04:23 +0100, Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> said:
> On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 09:46:53AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>> Which leads us to a dilemma: the longer the GFDL remain
>> unchallenged, the more entrenched it gets. There is also evidence
>> that people are using invariant sections in a manner not envisaged
>> by the authors of the GFDL: Ralf Hildebrandt's postfix page used to
>> have this license statement: `
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under
>> the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any
>> later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with the
>> Invariant Sections being THE WHOLE DOCUMENT (each section is
>> invariant). No Front- or Back-Cover Texts are provided. '
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> That's simply inconsistent with the text of the GFDL, and I'd guess
> it probably renders it undistributable (but IANAL). Invariant
> Sections must be Secondary, so unless the entire document falls
> outside its own overall subject the whole document cannot be
> Invariant. (I guess you know this, but just to spell it out ...)
Yes, thast was indeed an extreme (and untenable) case, and it
has now been fixed by the author. Perhaps it was a bad example to
underscore the point I was attempting to make: which is that as long
aswe keep the lid on the probelms we found in the gfdl, there are
people out there unaware of these issues, and lots of documentation
continues to go under a non-free license, from people who mean well.
We have to balance the carrot (the possibility that RMS can
indeed be swayed, and the GFDL changed) versus the stick (we continue
to ship non-free documentation in main, and more and more free
documentation transitions to non-free documentation, since people are
not aware of the problems).
I understand our exit strategy is to go with the position
statement if ever the talks break down. How do we handle the
situation where, with the best of intents, the talks never break
down, but there never is any concrete, visible progress?
manoj
--
He's dead, Jim.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
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