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Re: There was never a chance of a "GFDL compromise"



Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> The point I am making is that Debian might indeed remove the political
> essays from our manuals if they could be removed.  A few months ago,
> some people said here that if only the invariant sections could be
> removed (even though they could not be modified), nobody would ever
> remove them.  Now people are saying they would indeed be removed.

NO NO NO.  Nobody said that "nobody would ever remove the sections";
they said nobody would remove them IF they were free.  But free
requires that they be both modifiable and removable.  If they were
that, they would be there.

> The GFDL is doing its job by guarding against this.  Debian may label
> our manuals as "non-free", an appelation I disagree with and will
> criticize, but at least it cannot remove them.

Yep, it can.  The manuals will be removed.

> But now I see that this idea has a serious drawback: Debian would
> probably immediately remove the invariant sections and distribute the
> manual sans invariant sections under the GPL.  I think that nixes it.

Why not make the sections changeable?



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