On Thu, 2003-09-18 at 15:04, Florian Weimer wrote: > bts@alum.mit.edu (Brian T. Sniffen) writes: > > >> The GFDL allows you to make any changes you like in the technical > >> substance of the manual, just as the TeX license allows you to make > >> any changes you like in the technical substance of TeX. > > > > This is not true. There is no way for me to create a work of free > > software which is a derivative work of the Emacs Manual. > > If it's software, it can easily extract the relevant parts of the > manual while it's running. Think of Emacs and its Info viewer. But often if it's software, you want the data part embedded in the program part. Think of tooltips, about screens, menus and translations, --help output, literate programming, or pseudo-literate programming (i.e. Python docstrings, RDoc, POD). Regardless of how things behave in a perfect world, the reality is that hundreds of thousands of programs embed documentation within them, and for IMO perfectly valid reasons. -- Joe Wreschnig <piman@debian.org>
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