Re: New DFSG-compliant emacs packages
Yavor Doganov <yavor@doganov.org> wrote:
> > But whether or not Debian is going to keep the non-free section is
> > not really relevant to this discussion.
>
> This is irrelevant to any discussion on any Debian mailing list,
> because it makes people uneasy and guilty.
Like hell it does. We have flame wars about it on a regular basis
without your input, except we do it on the proper list.
> > Yes. rewriting the emacs manual would be hard. If you could help
> > with this, it would certainly be appreciated.
>
> Good luck in finding volunteers for that work. The GNU Emacs manual
> is a perfectly fine free manual for me. If you want to prove the
> contrary -- you'll have to prove that you really care about free
> software, not to betray the ideals of the Free Software Movement.
The above sentence makes no sense at all. We feel that the FSF license
for documentation is non-free. For us to prove that, we have to prove
that we care about free software?
We do care about free software, we even treat documentation like
software. Something that the FSF doesn't even do.
We have to not betray the ideals of the Free Software Movement to prove
that their documentation license is non-free? That makes no sense.
You're talking about the non-free section? Why don't you clarify that.
The non-free section has gotten progressively smaller. I have
contributed to getting stuff out of non-free and contrib and into main
(by getting upstream licenses changed). I thought it would soon be
small enough that getting rid of it wouldn't have been an issue. Now
we're increasing it again with the FSF political statement on free
software. We may need it for a while longer.
> You
> can't teach that violence is a sin while beating your wife to death --
> nobody will believe what you say.
The analogy is that we can't teach that the GDFL manuals are non-free
while what? Writing GFDL manuals? We don't do that. What's your point?
Wow. I think we'd raise attention on GNU mailing lists if we compared
writing GFDL manuals to beating your wife to death. I'm sure glad
nobody from our side of the debate used that analogy.
> If you think that the Emacs manual is non-free, you shouldn't
> distribute it as you shouldn't distribute any non-free software or
> non-free documentation. Distributing proprietary software is
> effectively saying that it is not bad, that it is legitimate. It
> encourages others (your users) to stop pursuing the goal of freedom.
>
> If the Debian project believes that giving non-free software to users
> is "support", a "service" to the free software community and is
> something acceptable, please don't educate me about software freedom.
> There is an abyss between us.
Indeed.
The FSF thinks it's fine to attach the price of a non-removable
political statement to an otherwise free manual. We don't. It's really
funny to see you guys treat us like bastards distributing
proprietary-software because we care more about documentation freedonm
than you do. The shoe is on the other foot and you can't even see it.
Please don't educate me about documentation freedom.
Peter
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