A Cc: was not necessary, I'm subscribed to debian-legal. http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct On Fri, 2003-09-12 at 12:29, Mathieu Roy wrote: > Scott James Remnant <scott@netsplit.com> a tapoté : > > > For most people on earth, I do not think that software defines "theses > > > works" (philosophical/political/historical texts) that may be "on > > > computer". > > > > > However the FSF have decided to include these > > "philosophical/political/historical texts" as part of the "associated > > documentation pertaining to the operation of a computer system". > > > > This therefore makes them part of that associated documentation, and > > thus includes them in your own quoted definition of Software. > > Discussion of whether or not they fit the Debian Free Software > > Guidelines is very relevant. > > > > If those texts *were not* part of the software documentation (and > > therefore Software), and were a document distributed separately, we > > wouldn't even need to have this discussion. > > But being part of a documentation does not change the nature of a > text. > Ok, so you agree that software's documentation should be as equally free as the software, and it's just the political bit that should have less freedom? > The philosophical/political/historical text really document the > software. > No they don't! They document either the FSF's or RMS's beliefs (or indeed the beliefs of anybody else who later modifies the file. Maybe I want to add a couple of Invariant sections to several GNU info files, as the first pages people see of course, perhaps with the Index at the bottom. The first calling for a world-wide campaign to have the current leader and government/administration of both the United States of America and United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland arrested and placed on trial for breach of international law and war-crimes arising from their invasion and conquering of another sovereign country. The second explaining very clearly why you should not choose the GFDL as a licence for your software's documentation, and instead advocating both Debian's and the Open Source Initiative's ideas of "free"-ness over that of the Non-Free Documentation Foundation. The GFDL allows me to do this, and it prevents anybody from ever changing or removing these sections. Neither of these new sections has anything to do with documenting the software, they're just ego-wank on the part of the person who added them (me in this case). And as for history sections being Invariant ... yeah, swell idea ... that way nobody can add to the history (time moves forward, ya know). > > Philosophical, political and historical texts, when included in a > > program's documentation, are part of that software. > > I do not agree. If I quote Kant in a History Scientific paper, it does > not makes this Kant's text I quoted an History-related related > text. It would still be a philosophic text, included in a > History-related text. > But they're not quoted, their verbatim, unremovable and unchangeable. Scott -- Have you ever, ever felt like this? Had strange things happen? Are you going round the twist?
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