On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 10:52:01AM +0000, Roger Leigh wrote: > Henning Glawe <glaweh@debian.org> writes: > > > On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 07:58:52PM -0500, Glenn Maynard wrote: > >> This really just isn't a problem that needs fixing. Once in a while, you get > >> confused or desperate people on d-legal trying to argue "we allow license > >> texts to be unmodifiable, so this invariant ode to my cat should be allowed, > >> too!", but you can't stop those stupid arguments by changing the DFSG. You > >> just end up replacing one dumb argument with another, equally dumb argument, > >> and complicate the guidelines in the process. > > > > just one thought: we have programs in main, where derived works are > > only allowed as original source+patches (TeX comes to my mind...) > > couldn't it be basically the same thing with GFDL documents? if > > there is an invariant section with an 'ode to my cat', why can't we > > add a section to the document telling the 'ode to my cat' is bloody > > stupid. this would be in some sense equivalent to a patch, only the > > interpreter is not the computer but the human brain (which is the > > target architecture for documentation anyways). > > It's not equivalent. A patch /changes/ the original to give you > something new, whereas adding additional material merely /extends/; a 'patch' in the first run is also an extension to the original source; only an interpreter (in most cases, /usr/bin/patch) makes a 'change' from it. in the case of documentation, where the 'interpreter' is the combination of eyes/ears and parts of the brain, a sentence telling 'the following section is bogus' can be seen as a patch. my point is: when it comes to documentation, how do you classify source and binary. One could argue the postscript/pdf/html file on the disk (or even it's dead-tree edition) is only an intermediate product, like e.g. java bytecode; the binary form is the knowledge a person absorbs when reading the document. It's all a matter of interpretation. > it's not hard to see long-term maintenance problems with this. See > the debian-vote archives for more detail. ask people working on software with 'derived-works-only-as-patches' licenses ;) -- c u henning
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