Re: documentation eq software ?
On Friday, Aug 29, 2003, at 14:05 US/Eastern, Mathieu Roy wrote:
Please point out which parts of Emacs documentation are
invariant. If I'm not mistaking, these parts express some personal
feelings. Personals feelings are not something that can be enhanced by
someone else.
Assuming your characterization of the invariant sections is correct for
the moment. _Expressions_ of "personal feelings" can certainly be
enhanced by someone else. As a (trivial) example, let's say I state as
my personal feeling:
The GNU GFDL with outr withour invarient sections is not a free
lisence.
You can certainly improve that by changing "lisence" into "license";
"outr" to "out"; "invarient" to "invariant"; and inserting a comma
after both "with" and "invariant".
Less trivially, you could (were it legal) take RMS essays on free
software and modify them to change them in to _your_ feelings on free
software. Or you could change the DFSG into the Debian Free
Documentation Guidelines.
Or, hey, for a real example, go look at John Locke's work. Notice how
it is an edited copy of another philosopher's work.
Personal feelings themselves can be, too. That is, after all, what
we're (hopefully) doing on this list.
I do not think these personal feeling are hurting people.
I do.
That's nice, eh? Really helps to present reasoned arguments in addition
to assertions, doesn't it?
If a text express a personal feelings, typo are not about to be fixed
to enhance the text: it would change the nature of the text.
And so what if it did? There is a difference between "you may not
create derivative works (e.g., 'change') this text" and "you may not
create works and claim they represent my personal opinions when they do
not."
Would you
like to enhance Cicero, for instance?
Cicero is rather dead, so it'd be a hard problem to enhance him.
Enhancing his works, on the other hand, is something that I should be
(and am, since those works are public domain) free to do.
The invariant text are not (should not be) manuals part but litteracy
part in a manual, it's something to be kept in mind.
Huh? I can't understand this.
As I already said, would you like the GPL or the DFSG to be variant?
Yes, and they already are (except for the FSF's GPL intro, which is
mostly an endorsement). But if you change them, they are no longer the
GPL or DFSG.
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