Re: Respect for Upstream Authors and Snippets of Interest
"Mahesh T. Pai" <paivakil@vsnl.net> writes:
> Barak Pearlmutter said on Fri, Sep 26, 2003 at 07:31:14PM -0600,:
>
> > In a recent message to this list, RMS mentioned that people had stated
> > that Debian would remove all non-modifiable but removable text from
> > Debian packages:
>
> If Debian does not, somebody else will, and I guess that this is what
> RMS wants to prevent.
I'm willing to bet someone _does_ remove those sections. How many
restrictions are you willing to put on the good guys in order to
get the bad guys?
> If those files were
> modifiable / removable, and if somebody did, in fact, modify them, and
> I (or any other user) had come across that distro, I would never have
> turned to Debian.
It's not like you'd find out about Debian from the FSF, anymore. I think
the evidence is that they are removable, and again I'd bet that someone
does remove them.
> one bad apple in that 'everybody'
One bad apple in that 'everybody' might distribute a broken GCC that
couldn't compile the kernel or other major chunks of code, leaving the
users to use DRM-enabled versions of the kernel. They could even have
the only version of GCC that would compile a kernel for that architecture.
There's a lot of things we could do to stop this, but most of them would
put too much trouble on the good guys (i.e. be non-free).
> I think the only way out would be to create a separate section for
> GFDl'ed docs with invariant sections named something like GFDL-doc or
> doc-semifree (or whatever - nonfree is harsh and unwarranted term).
There are licenses in nonfree ranging from "[...] don't even think about
running nm on this binary" to (one semifamous, now relicensed) "here's
the source, do whatever you want with it, just pet a cat sometime". If
you want a semifree, there's a lot more stuff that should be moved there.
I hardly see what good drawing another line between 'semifree' and 'nonfree'
will do, though.
--
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