Raul Miller wrote:
On 2/13/06, Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> wrote:you people never give up, do you? as soon as one bogus claim against the GFDL is disproved, you recycle another one that was demolished months, weeks, or only days ago. repeat ad nauseum.Another possibility is that you're begging the question. (Begging the question means: assuming your conclusion is true in your argument about why the conclusion is true.) How about we try a different approach: Let's say that we want GFDL'd documentation to be a part of main. (That's going to be true for at least some people in the project.) How do we describe what it is that we want? Do we need to keep an arbitrary list of licenses, and everything that's on that list is "OK"? Do we just want to use the non-free criteria (everything that we can legally distribute)?
In every matter, it is virtually impossible to write a rule that can mechanically be interpreted to give a suitable result. For normal law, the judge have the ability to interpret the laws as long as the interpretation conforms to the spirit and the original will of the law. The same must be applied with the DFSG and the central question should be "can we practically exercise our freedom" and I think the answer is yes for the GFDL even if there can be inconvenience. The preamble of the GPL is also some king of invariant section: it says nothing about the license itself but has only political claims:
[...]The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it.
[...]When I say that, a lot of people (which I would call zealots) say that this argument is irrelevant and must not be discussed because it is obvious that the license is not the software and must be keep intact.
But this shows at least that there can be "sequence of octets" which are not the software itself and must be preserved. I claim that the invariant sections is just the same: it is not part of the documentation (this is required by the GFDL) and there must be preserved.
For the people who don't agree, I would kindly ask them to say if they would consider free a license which give you all the freedoms you like but must be preserved intact if this license contains a preamble of length similar to the invariant section of GFDL? I have ask the question in the past but nobody have answered because it was a "facile" argument. But if this argument is "facile"; please answer.
The other objections of the GFDL (DRM, etc...) is based on a bogus reading of the GFDL.
Olive