Re: The draft Position statement on the GFDL

[Glenn Maynard <g_deb@zewt.org>]

On Wed, May 12, 2004 at 08:24:36AM -0400, Raul Miller wrote:
> And I explained that your logic only applied to the parts which
> were not licensed under the GPL -- not to the parts that are.

Your counterargument doesn't make sense.

DFSG#3 requires that "The license must allow modifications and derived
works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the
license of the original software."

Derived works which are under the same terms as the original software must
be distributable.

If you combine gcc (GPL) with libsecret.so (GPL-incompatible), the result
is a derived work which is not under the same terms as the license of
the original software, which is a case DFSG#3 explicitly doesn't care about.

I don't see how "parts" enters into the equation.  You're free to take the
GPL parts, remove the GPL-incompatible parts and distribute them again.
However, when they're combined, you have a single derived work that is not
available under the original terms, and DFSG#3 does not require that such
a work be distributable.

I feel that I'm repeating myself.  If you have a counterargument, I'll have
to ask you to be more explicit.  If you can't be, then we may be at a dead
end due to communications problems.

> Anyways, there's another aspect to the GPL where it imposes a requirement
> that modification be restricted.  It requires that the license document
> be provided with the licensed program, and forbids modifications to the
> license document.

I've already discussed this at length, in my posts regarding license texts
vs. license terms.

(And all of this is based on the premise that the DFSG is something other
than a set of guidelines which d-legal interprets, and it seems to have lost
all relevance to the original GFDL discussion.  None of this has any bearing
on the fact that the GFDL's restrictions are not Free; nit picking "all"
versus "some" will not make invariant sections and cover texts any more free.
Unless we can get past what appears to be a communication problem somewhere,
I may drop this subthread soon in the interests of time.)

-- 
Glenn Maynard