Re: New DFSG-compliant emacs packages
On Sunday 29 October 2006 01:25 am, David Kastrup wrote:
> > I am prevented from making a small version of the manual to
> > go along with the emacs prc I hav made for my palm device; since
> > memory all limited.
>
> Not at all. You are prevented from _distributing_ such a manual, and
> I have not ever seen such a project. It would probably be easy enough
> to get permission from the FSF for such a version without the GNU
> manifesto if you could show its usefulness.
No, the FDL explicitly says "You may copy and Distribute the document ...
provided that this License, the copyright notices, and the license notice ...
are reproduced in all copies." So it does apply to any copies whatsoever
that you make. (Also, how is one supposed to show its usefulness without
sending it to them, which _would_ be an act of distributing the modified
manual?)
Here's another reason I consider FDL manuals for programming languages like
Emacs, Bison, or Flex especially egregious: suppose I include some example
code from the manual in a program I'm writing. Whoops, suddenly the FDL
applies to my program, and anybody who prints out my source code has to call
it "A GNU Manual", which is ridiculous; and if I also used any GPL code, I'm
just out of luck. Unless I assign copyright to the FSF so they can use their
ownership of the example code to relicense, and that might be something I'm
not willing to do. Moreover, in the case of Emacs, I have to include the GNU
manifesto with the program distribution, whether or not I completely agree
with it.
There are also problems with the current FDL, in that it makes it a license
violation to transmit an FDL document over an encrypted SSH connection, or
even chmod o-r it. Those are things any user should be able to do without
thinking about it, which is why I actually voted for the option "FDL is
non-DFSG in all cases" in the GR. But it seems I was in the minority among
Debian developers on that one...
--
Daniel Schepler
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