On Fri, Nov 30, 2001 at 10:01:27AM -0700, Richard Stallman wrote: > And you will continue doing that, even when pointed out that this puts > an obstacle to the reuse of technical documentation even among manuals > for free, GPL-licensed software? > > It is not an obstacle--at most a small detour. And it is very > important to spread the word about GNU and free documentation. I think Henning was referring to the case where one wants to use small portions of a GNU Manual verbatim. If the amount of Invariant text a person has to reproduce to do this dwarfs the text being quotes, they're likely to simply not use the material from the GNU Manual. This is bad for either or both users and GNU, since the alternatives are: 1) author leaves tool or feature undocumented GNU's word is not spread, field left open for O'Reilly to write a proprietary manual on the tool 2) author writes lousy documentation instead GNU's word is not spread, users frustrated with bad documentation 3) author writes good documentation independently GNU's word is not spread (furthermore, if the author licenses this documentation text liberally, it will actually compete with GNU's documentation) -- G. Branden Robinson | What influenced me to atheism was Debian GNU/Linux | reading the Bible cover to cover. branden@debian.org | Twice. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- J. Michael Straczynski
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