Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the FDL

["Leonardo Boselli" <leo@dicea.unifi.it>]

I have read the thead throught another list, so pse reply directly to
me.
I second Georg's statement:
I add some notes on italian author rigfhts law: the right to integrity
of work is -except for some works- inalienable. So a license that
would require "no invariant section" would be unforceable.
But the same laws allow to get some part of a protected work to be
included in another one, up to a limit of 10% of original work (for
text) or 100 cm² (for graphics) just giving mention of the origin.
This would be the case of the help popup ....
Another important note: some time a work is made for academic
purpose, there are no problem in releasing it free, but putting a
cover page would warrant against misappropriations.
So I support the idea of recommending that strict program
documentation are to be ïnvariant free", but also allow that
complete works [such for example a book on how to use a certain
program] are GFDL at the author chice.
There is also in debian (as required for installation!) a package that
is gpl, but has two documentations: one complete but very uneasy
to use, plain GPL and another one more useble that is not even
free [as $$] (and this is not on debian, onmly at bookshops) !




--
Leonardo Boselli
Nucleo Informatico e Telematico del Dipartimento Ingegneria Civile
Universita` di Firenze , V. S. Marta 3 - I-50139 Firenze
tel +39 0554796431 cell +39 3488605348 fax +39 055495333
http://www.dicea.unifi.it/~leo