Re: The draft Position statement on the GFDL

[Raul Miller <moth@debian.org>]

On Mon, May 10, 2004 at 05:15:12PM +0100, Henning Makholm wrote:
> > > It is a factual accuracy that FSF makes money by selling hardcopies of
> > > my derivate.
> 
Scripsit Raul Miller <moth@debian.org>
> > I'd call this hypothetical.  And, tangential.

On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 02:11:23PM +0100, Henning Makholm wrote:
> Only if you consider the possibility of deriving derivates from
> DFSG-free stuff hypothetical and tangential in general.

Eh? It's true that the sentence in question uses the word "derivate",
however [a] this derivate does not exist (thus making the sentence
hypothetical), and [b] the point of the sentence seemed to have to do
with making money (thus making the sentence tangential).

Here's another example of a tangential sentence which still uses words
that might seem relevant.

   My dog ate the derived copy of the software.

> > > No. Cover texts has to go on the cover.
> 
> > Of the GFDL licensed component, not on the work as a whole.
> 
> The work as a whole inherits the GFDL license of the manual I derived
> it from.

There's at least two different ways of legally combining the works of
multiple authors into a single work.  One way involves getting the authors
to agree on some copyright license and putting the whole work under a
single license.  The other involves combining elements under different
licenses into a single whole (which is independently copyrightable but
which is made possible by the individual licenses).

Some licenses (the GPL is a good example) include requirements which
are relevant to the copyright as a whole.  In the case of the GFDL,
however, it's not that specific.

> > And, as I said in the message you were responding to, while the GFDL
> > approach is unwieldy, it's less so than a "patches only" license could be.
> 
> A patches-only license that does not allow distribution of
> ready-to-run versions of modified works is not DFSG-free either. If we
> apply that criteria to human-readable documentation, a free license
> should allow distribution of modified ready-to-read documents. It may
> require that everyone who receives such a ready-to-read documents can
> also opt to receive machine-readable source of the original and a
> machine-readable description of the differences.

"ready to read" and "ready to run" are not equivalent.

-- 
Raul