Re: GNU FDL 1.2 draft comment summary posted, and RFD
On Wed, 2002-06-12 at 14:42, Joe Wreschnig wrote:
>
> I would like to see some way to mark sections unmodifiable but
> removable/renamable, e.g. acknowledgements or dedications, at the very
> least. I don't like or understand the FDL policy of making them
> unremovable, but I do understand the need for making certain sections
> unmodifiable (it's a lot harder to misrepresent someone with source code
> than with documents). Remember, ideally this is not just for program
> documentation.
As you have observed, there's a question about whether this is
compatible with the DFSG, in letter or spirit.
It seems that the biggest problem with the various documentation
licenses floating around is the question of attribution. On the one
hand, people want credit for what they did say; on the other, people
don't necessarily want to be associated with an altered form of what
they said.
Most of the other problems can be reduced to one of those two. The
plagarism question isn't really a problem, since this whole thing is
motivated by freedom. Given that, I don't think that anyone would have
a problem with others deriving new writings from their work as long as
proper attribution is given. The only purpose I don't see served by
this is the desire by some (the FSF, among others) to force people to
distribute some manifesto or historical document in a set of
documentation; a lot of people who value freedom seem to have a distaste
for this, so I don't think it's important.
So it seems to me that it would be useful to have a documentation
license that was more strict about attribution. Perhaps it could
require that all individual changes be clearly identified in a README.
Or, all changes must be represented as patches against an original
without prior approval from the original copyright holder. (If we do
this, we should probably think about providing some way for a document
to be "condensed" over time without losing attribution, so that the
patches don't grow bigger than the document itself.)
If such a license were available, then the need for Invariant Sections
might be less.
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