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Re: The debate on Invariant sections (long)



On Fri, 2003-05-23 at 19:37, Branden Robinson wrote:
> > Philosophically, that speech isn't functional is controversial claim.
> 
> It's not functional for Derrida and others of his ilk.
> 
> For most other people, it certainly is.  You'd better hope the speech
> of, say, air traffic controllers is functional!

I do get what your saying, Orwell used his Newspeak to divide this kind
of thing into Speech and Technical Speech, one provides material for
debate and personal opinion the other provides a functional description
of events or actions. It seems to fit right to me.
FWIW I think RMS is right to insist that others cannot modify his
political comments, but I think you are right to say that unmodifiable
comments and texts (UTs) have no place being mandatorily included in the
functional world of Free Software.  
Personally, I found a lot of the GNU philosophical texts included in
emacs to be very interesting and educational, they led me to the GNU and
Debian projects, it would be a shame to remove them simply to prove a
point when they are fundamental in helping new users to understand the
basis of the Free Software movement.
Would a possible answer be that distribution of the UTs is not
mandatory, so purely functional versions of the package can be
distributed, but if the UTs are distributed then they remain
unmodifiable? It looks like a sensible compromise to me.


-- 
John Holroyd <valisk@softhome.net>
Demos Technosis Ltd

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