Re: A possible GFDL compromise
Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
> There is *no* license which is free-for-software which would allow the
> use of such a manual section in isolation. None. Because, of course,
> the FSF's definition of free, as applied to software, doesn't allow
> invariant sections.
>
> That's both inaccurate (since it does, in some ways, allow them) and
> irrelevant (because we don't apply our definition of free software to
> manuals, and Debian may not apply it to anything), but in addition,
> this problem doesn't really depend on invariant sections at all. The
> same would be true for a GPL-covered manual, because you can't use
> snippets without a copy of the GPL (unless they are fair use).
My point is precisely that a GFDL manual *cannot* be incorporated into
*ANY* free software project. And this is *different* from the old
documentation license, which did not have that problem. This is a
true statement.
You had said that even the old "simple license" was incompatible with
some free software licenses, which is true: but it was not
incompatible with all of them. By contrast, the GFDL is incompatible
with all of them. And it's incompatible precisely because its terms,
if applied to software, would be recognized as nonfree.
> However, the point is that the simple license, was always compatible
> with at least one free software license. For example, one could
> easily distribute software under the simple license itself.
>
> I don't think anyone ever did so. In practice, the issue is not
> significant, since you can distribute the manual along with the
> software, and make the software access the manual in whichever way you
> want.
Is that how Emacs gets its doc strings?
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