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Re: GFDL - status?



Anthony DeRobertis <asd@suespammers.org> wrote:
> On Sunday, Jul 6, 2003, at 18:39 US/Eastern, MJ Ray wrote:
>> I think that GFDL is only called a "free documentation licence" which 
>> is probably technically accurate, even if I don't like it.
> The only sense in which the GFDL is a free documentation license is 
> that I didn't have to pay to download it from <http://www.gnu.org/>.

You disagree that the documentation part of a GFDL-covered work is
acceptably licensed?  I do not talk about the work as a whole, which seems
clearly not to be.  Some of the format restrictions are questionable,
I guess.

This is all semantics and doesn't really change the current situation,
but it's probably why FSF called it the "free documentation licence"
rather than "free document licence" and is a useful thing to remember.
I don't think it's useful to start trying to claim that it isn't a free
documentation licence and obscures the real point that matters to us here:
can this whole work be included in Debian?

Related points that I consider interesting and relevant to what happens
next are: is there any legal basis for distinguishing programs from other
literary works?  From other electronically stored works?  What about
fonts?  Encoding tables?  Is DFSG sufficiently general?

-- 
MJR/slef   My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
      http://mjr.towers.org.uk/   jabber://slef@jabber.at
Creative copyleft computing services via http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
       Thought: "Changeset algebra is really difficult."



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