Re: documentation eq software ?
Mathieu Roy wrote:
>Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> a tapoté :
>> "Authors", then. Please don't degenerate to pedanticism when the meaning
>> is clear.
>
>Hum, I think you misunderstood my answer. I was not aware of this
>issue in coreutils and I wonder about which author of ls we are
>talking about.
It's a hypothetical example. I could insert a statement into coreutils
that misrepresented the authors' political opinions without violating
the license.
>> The main purpose of documentation is not to make a political stand.
>
>It can be. If you describe why you wrote a software as free software,
>you are making a political stand.
No. That's a secondary purpose.
>> Nor is it to describe why the software was written.
>
>It's up to the author of the documentation to decide what he thinks
>important to be in the documentation he's writing.
But that argument applies equally well to software, yet you believe that
opinions in software should not be protected.
>> Some people wish to include this in their documentation, and some
>> people wish to include political statements in their software. The
>> GFDL protects the first of these - the GPL does not protect the
>> second. Why do you believe that they are different?
>
>If the GFDL invariant section was used to include political statement
>that have nothing to do with computers (like racist statement, as
>proposed before), I would find normal to trash these documentation
>that use the GFDL invariant section for a purpose out of the scope of
>Debian.
So you classify some forms of political statement as more worthwhile?
Which political statements should Debian accept? Which should it reject?
>But a political stand about computers within a documentation
>describing the software does not seems a problem to me: it documents
>the software! It's the purpose of the documentation. While at the
>contrary, including the manifesto within emacs, for instance, does not
>require a protection (it's not a part of the software and can be
>safely removed, if present).
No, a political statement does not document the software. It tells us
something about the author's motivations. Making a political statement
within the software does exactly the same. Why do you believe that one
should be protected and the other shouldn't?
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59-chiark.mail.debian.legal@srcf.ucam.org
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