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Re: PROPOSED: interpretive guidelines regarding DFSG 3, modifiability, and invariant text



On Tue, Nov 27, 2001 at 01:37:53PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> to be stretching the purpose of a Secondary Section.  Or is the FSF's
> intent to permit people to use the GNU FDL to protect a 3-page reference
> card for some program, accompanied by a 100-page novella which begins,
> "It was a dark and stormy night..."?, and mark the latter Invariant so
> that no one can remove it?

The intent, although IMO abusable, is to give the author a chance to make
a statement, but continue to allow derivative works of all the actual
relevant material. This is seen in a small degree in the GPL itself,
which requires a copy of itself to be included in GPL'd works, and itself
includes a preamble of text that we might term 'invariant' by FDL terms.

> see anything wrong with me piggybacking my very large and sorry attempt
> at the Great American Novel on some documentation I may have written for,
> say, the SDL library, and using the GNU FDL to do it? 

Agreed.

Debian is in a great position of being able to attach a policy to the
use of a license as well, however. FDL + some policy, whether that
be Branden's suggestion, or a specific set of guidelines on what may
or may not be in the invariant sections, seems a good way to go. We should
be at least a little cognizant of the work that has gone into the FDL,
from both a legal and philosophical standpoint.

-drew

-- 
M. Drew Streib <dtype@dtype.org>, Free Standards Group (freestandards.org)
co-founder, SourceForge.net | core team, freedb | sysadmin, Linux Intl.
creator, keyanalyze report | maintnr, *.us.pgp.net | other, see freedom/law

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