Re: "Robinson, Nerode and other free beer zealots" was: A possible GFDL compromise
On Mon, 15 Sep 2003, Dmitry Borodaenko wrote:
>On Sun, Sep 14, 2003 at 11:00:01PM +0900, Fedor Zuev wrote:
>> >> There a lot of people in this list, who cares very much
>> >> about cost ("Invariant Sections is clearly non-free"), but cares
>> >I don't see what that has to do with cost.
>> Every requirement to keep a some additional bunch of bits in
>> distribution, is, without doubt, about a cost, and only about a
>> cost.
>Not only. Cost difference (be it financial cost, technical cost, or
>cost in effort spent) may be prohibitive. Especially when
>difference is not marginal, but rather in order of magnitude.
Of course. But please note a small detail here. You already
_received_ the work. To distribute the work, you should first
_receive_ it. Receive from someone, who distributed it according the
license requirements. So, cost of distribution is not prohibitive
for him. Your additional cost of distribution is no more than that
cost, because you always may accompany copies of your derivative
work with identical copies of original work in the form you received
it. So, cost is not prohibitive for you as well. And cost will not
grow in the next steps, therefore it is not prohibitive as long as
you are rich enough to buy copying equipment.
>Example: embedded or palmtop devices with limited amount of memory
>can not use software that is legally tied to megabytes of
>documentation.
Then you should accompany this embedded or palmtop device
with a CD, which contains a unstripped copy of documentation. In
fact, very likely that you will supply your embedded device with
"Documentation and Drivers Disk" anyway, so there will not any
additional cost al all.
>As I've already proposed in this list, the solution may be to allow
>to unbundle parts of the material, on the condition that a valid
>link to previous, complete version is provided.
_Who_ will pay for the hosting of all different versions
of manual during many years (at least 5, but likely many more)?
_Who_ guarantees that link will be valid after, say, 50 years?
Life of a program short, and this subject is not of great
importance for them. But literary works usually lives much longer.
It is not wise to rely on the action that _may_ perform someone in a
far future. He may simply die next day after he give you a copy.
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