Re: Should our documentation be free? (Was Re: Inconsistencies in
"Joe Moore" <joemoore@iegrec.org> writes:
> Joe Wreschnig said:
>> On Tue, 2003-08-05 at 05:46, Joe Moore wrote:
>>> Joe Wreschnig said:
>>> > On Mon, 2003-08-04 at 14:37, Joe Moore wrote:
>>> >> How is that harder with the FDL "History" section than with the
>>> >> "clearly marked" BSD code, or the GPL-required changelog?
>>> >
>>> > The document trail in "History" may not exist anymore (or may be
>>> > inadaquate); you can't just say "Oh, this Invariant Section didn't
>>> > exist 2 years ago; I'll take it out and pretend I had that version."
>>> > You need to actually have a license for that version.
>>>
>>> In other words, it is not at all harder with documents under the GFDL,
>>> than it is with source under BSD, or the [L]GPL.
>>
>> You can extract the BSD-licensed code from the proprietary code, and
>> use only it. There's no requirement in the BSD-licensed code that you
>> must distribute proprietary code that it was linked to at one point.
>
> And that is exactly the same as what is required by the GFDL.
>
> If you know that paragraph X was in the FooWare manual before EvilCo added
> its invariant section, then you can distribute paragraph X without EvilCo's
> invariant section. (assuming you fulfill the rest of the requirements of
> the GFDL invoked by the FooWare manual from before EvilCo's modification)
That's not true. The BSD license is granted to all third parties, so
if I find a section of some proprietary code I know was written by
UCB, I can just take that section. The GFDL is a license only to the
recipient, so in order to take a free section from an older version,
I'd need to have received that version.
-Brian
--
Brian T. Sniffen bts@alum.mit.edu
http://www.evenmere.org/~bts/
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