Re: A possible GFDL compromise
Fedor Zuev <fedor@earth.crust.irk.ru> writes:
> But if you take Acrobat, remove, say, the Adobe EULA, and
> distribute the rest, it will be censorship or, at least, very
> similar. Because you conceal from users the information from
> creator, that they reasonable expect to receive from you. Against
> the will both the user and creator.
First, let's be honest here. The number of users who will be annoyed
by the wasted disk space probably outnumber the number of users who
want the GNU manifesto attached to every GNU manual. It is in the
nature of users to be pragmatic. The number of users who really
want to see the Adobe EULA is much lower. Furthermore, the Adobe
EULA, being a license document, is moot.
Taken to the extreme, a program which happens to search through your
files for porn and emails it back to the upstream is performance art,
and therefore should not be touched. More classic free speech would
be a program that pops up a box if you run it on a non-free system
and reads to you the GNU manifesto before letting you do anything.
Would we tolerate that as free software? I sure wouldn't.
If an author wants to tack his lecture onto his free manual for free
software, I expect the same rights, to delete the annoying and
space-wasting parts. More importantly, what happens when Joe Bob's
pop-mail 0.1 becomes ESR's fetchmail 179.3? Free software means that
can happen; but your definition won't let that happen for free
documentation, because Joe Bob hated guns and put a thirty page
manifesto to that effect in his 'free' documentation, making it
unusable for ESR's fetchmail. I guess ESR could toss in a thirty
page manifest about how guns are good, but I'd rather not see
a flame war in my manual.
That is the nature of free software and free documentation,
to put Debian under our control, to let things go beyond
one solitary point of control and one opinion.
> It may, also, be copyright infringement, of course.
That's why we're having this argument, because we can't go around
breaking licenses. Duh.
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