Re: A possible GFDL compromise: a proposal
On 2003-09-09 10:11:19 +0100 Mathieu Roy <yeupou@gnu.org> wrote:
Not *in* Debian, but *shipped by* Debian. For you, there's no
distinction between GNU Emacs manual and Macromedia Flash?
Not in the way under discussion here: neither is free software.
This is not at all absurd. When you tell people they can find non-free
software at -this address-, you advertise for this non-free software.
So FSF advertises for SCO, according to your reasoning? After all,
they give an address for SCO.
To synthetise, you argue that a link is never a recommendation because
somes links are not recommendations. This is truly absurd.
There is no need to synthesise. I argued that links are not
recommendations by countering your apparent proposition that any link
is recommendation. If you agree that some links are not
recommendations, then please clarify why you believe a particular link
to be recommendation despite clear statements that it is not meant as
a recommendation. Further, I propose that no links are
recommendations because wording is required to recommend something;
and that Debian as a project makes no such recommendations.
[...]
and we're about to claim that GFLed documentation, which may not at
all having any invariant part, is non-free stuff.
No, we claim that FDL-covered documents are not free software.
"non-free" is merely local jargon for that, not an indication of
"non-free stuff". Other discussions are tangents.
Whether or not it is "free stuff" is abstract and difficult to discuss
in the absence of a "free stuff definition". People have tried during
this thread, but generalising from the free software definition does
seem to reach the conclusion that FDL-covered works are not free
stuff. If you are careful, you may show that the documentation part
is free stuff, but you cannot take the documentation part alone from
the work, so the work is still not free stuff. This is not directly
relevant, though.
It seems weird to me. Someone said that GFLed documentation without
invariant sections can be made non-free if someone getting a copy of
the documentation add invariant sections.
...in the absence of other problems, this would not be enough to
prevent the original from being free, as you correctly explain.
So what are the others problems (on purpose, I ignore problems that
already got a decent answer)?
Please see other threads, notably the summaries and FAQ.
--
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