Re: DFSG FAQ (draft)
MJ Ray <markj@cloaked.freeserve.co.uk> writes:
> Three problems with that hypothesis:-
>
> 1. We don't have any way of distinguishing software and this documentation
> in a safe manner. My local research suggests that software is generally
> treated as a literary work and electronic documentation definitely is.
> Even if Debian can distinguish them, I'm not sure that the law can.
If we want to make a distinction, we want to make it for our own sake,
not for legal reasons. We can chose completely arbitrary rules (as
long as we don't encourage copyright infringement, of course). For
our peace of mind, they should be consistent, but even that is
unnecessary.
For example, we could happily distribute unmodified RFCs from a legal
point of view, but we might well reject the very cumbersome
restrictions on derived works, and choose to distribute it
nevertheless (*gasp*), but with an attached "non-free" sticker
(obviously for purely political reasons).
(I don't want to ridicule the approach towards RFCs. After some
consideration, I find it perfectly sound. It's hardly a burden
anyway; for those following stable, an RFC mirroring script is much
more practical.)
> 2. The documentation is not the issue. The entire FDL-covered work is.
In my eyes, the GNU Manifesto is an integral part of the GNU Emacs
documentation.
> 3. What about other content?
Can be decided case-by-case. For example, if the maintainer is forced
to do something which would violate the license (or a user makes a
convincing real-world case that the license fails to provide him with
his natural rights to this content), it still can be removed.
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