Re: coupling software documentation and political speech in the GFDL
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian T. Sniffen" <bts@alum.mit.edu>
To: "Dylan Thurston" <dpt@math.harvard.edu>
Cc: <debian-legal@lists.debian.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 28, 2003 7:47 PM
Subject: Re: coupling software documentation and political speech in the
GFDL
> Dylan Thurston <dpt@math.harvard.edu> writes:
>
> > On 2003-09-26, Bruce Perens <bruce@perens.com> wrote:
> >> The conflict is around the need professed by FSF to hitch political
speech
> >> to the cart of software documentation, and the fact that Debian, while
it
> >> may have been designed in part to achive a social or political goal,
was
> >> designed to deliver software rather than political speech.
> >
> > Sure, that's a nice analysis. What do you propose to do about it?
> > Debian would be quite happy to distribute modifiable political speech
> > (with suitable provisions for protecting the author's integrity), but
> > the FSF has not shown any interest in considering that possibility;
> > and most DDs posting here seem quite firm in the view that
> > unmodifiable political speech is not allowed.
>
> Bear in mind that Debian does distribute freely modifiable political
> text, for which the original author is *dead*, and yet his original
> words are still copied about substantially unchanged: the book of
> Amos, for example, in package bible-kjv-text. I think RMS fear that
> we would somehow change his essays is severely unfounded.
> Additionally, his argument is misleading in ways which prevent
> counterargument: there's no way we could change his essays. We might
> derive works from his essays, though it is unlikely they would be
> noticeably similar to his essays.
>
> -Brian
>
>
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