Re: The draft Position statement on the GFDL
Raul Miller wrote:
>>>[A] These would have to be factual inaccuracies in a secondary section
>>>(which rather limits the scope of any such inaccuracy).
>
> On Mon, May 10, 2004 at 08:13:05AM +0100, Henning Makholm wrote:
>
>>It could also be Cover Texts. The documentation currently distributed
>>by the FSF require the cover text "a GNU manual" and a notice that
>>implies that the FSF sells copies of the text. Both of these turn into
>>factual inaccuracies if I modify the manual to become documentation of
>>the BSD implementation of the tool in question.
>
> I agree that this is bulky and akward.
>
> I don't agree that this requires any factual inaccuracy. You can create
> a derived copy of the work which eliminates the content you don't want,
> and wrap the remainder in the required cover and include that as a
> chapter or appendix in some other manual.
Unless the derived document falls under section 7, "AGGREGATION WITH
INDEPENDENT WORKS" (which requires that more than half of the document
consists of independent work not derived from the GFDLed document), you
must put the covers around the entire derived work, not just part of it.
Also, are you suggesting that you would not build on the content
directly, but only include portions of it in an appendix and refer to in
in the main document? If so, see below.
> Note that content under a "patches only" license will give you much
> worse problems when incorporating it (perhaps as examples, or perhaps
> pulling documentation from a help menu item) into other documentation.
DFSG4 allows "patches only" licenses, but only if they satisfy the rest
of DFSG4, which requires that "The license must explicitly permit
distribution of software built from modified source code.". So a
"patches only" license would make the source of the documentation
inconvenient to work with, but the resulting "compiled" documentation
could be identical to what you would create without dealing with such a
license. On the other hand, you seem to be suggesting that Debian could
treat a GFDL work as a "patches only" license which applies to both the
source and compiled versions, which would not be DFSG-free.
- Josh Triplett
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