Re: The draft Position statement on the GFDL
Raul Miller Wrote
> On Sun, May 09, 2004 at 12:08:56PM -0400, Anthony DeRobertis wrote:
>> The GFDL could requires us not to fix factual inaccuracies.
>
> How so?
>
> [A] These would have to be factual inaccuracies in a secondary section
> (which rather limits the scope of any such inaccuracy).
Some of the inaccuracies I recall from the last GFDL debate included the
address of the FSF in the GNU Emacs manual's Invariant sections, if the FSF
moves.
Also, most of the GNU manuals available at
http://www.gnu.org/manual/manual.html declare the GPL v2 as an invariant
section, which, once the GPLv3 is applicable to those software projects,
should really be updated. (For the works licensed under GPL2 or later)
Debian (or anyone other than the copyright holder (FSF)) can not incorporate
even minor corrections.
>
> [B] Nothing in the GFDL prohibits us from adding additional context or
> content to make the facts (or differing points of view) clear.
While not forbidding additional invariant sections, the only way to
"clarify" inaccuracies in a GFDL invariant section is to add additional
invariant sections, which leads to an unacceptable bloat of A-said B-said
competing invariant sections.
>
> [C] If the inaccuracies are, in fact, fraud, then the license terms
> can't legally require that they be repeated.
But the license forbids distribution of _ANY_ derivative work without the
invariant sections, which under the "fraud" assumption in [C] means that the
entire, useful manual can not be distributed. (Or even just one particular
chapter of the manual that documents the command line switches for the
program.)
--Joe
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