Re: translations under Creative Commons license?
On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 05:58:52PM -0400, Michael D. Crawford wrote:
> So, are you suggesting that freedom would be better served if the GNU
> manifesto provided for modification? Note the manifesto's license:
Careful. You're likely to get your thread hooked into a discussion
that's been going on for about three years now. Don't go there unless
you really mean it.
> Suppose the Manifesto were a free document. That would allow Microsoft's
> PR flacks to "update" the Manifesto to exhort the user to protect corporate
> rights to intellectual property, and illustrate how respecting End User
> License Agreements stimulates not only the nation's, but the world's
> economy.
If Microsoft wished to create a "Corporate Domination Manifesto", should
they not be free to re-use parts of the GNU Manifesto?
If Microsoft wished to create an incompatible variant of C, should they
not be free to re-use parts of gcc?
In both cases, the end products would be free, but the effect is
undesirable. In both cases, you can worry about the potential harm
of allowing such bad usage, or anticipate the potential benefit of
allowing good usage. Why would you make a different decision for
a manifesto than for a compiler?
Note: If you're worrying about Microsoft creating a corporate
domination manifesto and *calling* it "The GNU Manifesto", then
you should be aware that you can't stop them with copyright law.
They're free to write one and call it that. All you can do is
stop them from re-using parts of the real GNU Manifesto if they
do that -- and that doesn't take a non-free license, since you
can just require that derived works be given a different name.
> I'm aiming to do the same thing with music, and I don't want the record
> industry to put words in my mouth. Neither do I want to allow that of
> people who might be well meaning but incompetent.
You sound a bit like the author of qmail :-) He's concerned about
what well-meaning but incompetent people might do with his software,
too.
Richard Braakman
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