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Re: old and new GNU documentation licenses, and the some of the manuals to which they apply



[ Mailing list admins, please see the end of this message. ]

On Mon, Sep 08, 2003 at 09:11:16AM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 07, 2003 at 07:16:51PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> > * GAWK: The GNU Awk User's Guide; Edition 2, "for the 3.0.3 (or later)
> >   version of the GNU implementation of AWK."
> > 
> >   This manual's new license is:
> > 
> >      Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
> >   under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
> >   any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with the
> >   Invariant Sections being "GNU General Public License", the Front-Cover
>                              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> People who like to bitch about the GPL being non-free take note: *this*
> time it really is. Contemplate the differences.

I concur.  This use of the GNU General Public License violates my
proposed interpretive guideline for DFSG 3[1].

It also, to my understanding, violates Bruce Perens's intentions
regarding the meaning of the DFSG[2].  He said "My feeling is that
invariant sections are OK for attribution and the copyright statement
and license ONLY, and not for other aspects of the document."

I interpret Bruce to mean the attributions, copyright statements and
licenses that actually applies to the work in question, not various and
sundry other such things that don't.

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200112/msg00245.html
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200308/msg00690.html

[ UH OH.  I just noticed that the de-spamification of the mailing list
archives has caused some URLs from Google to point to the wrong
messages.  IMO this is deeply unfortunate.  :(

For example, search Google for "final interpretive guideline DFSG" and
note that the top link result doesn't go to that message, but rather to
a different one.

This deeply sucks.  It will take ages for Google to correct its view of our
entire mailing list archives.  :( :( :( ]

-- 
G. Branden Robinson                |    To Republicans, limited government
Debian GNU/Linux                   |    means not assisting people they
branden@debian.org                 |    would sooner see shoveled into mass
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |    graves.          -- Kenneth R. Kahn

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