Glenn Maynard wrote:
On Thu, Feb 16, 2006 at 10:49:47AM +0400, olive wrote:You have? You elided the bulk of Don's response wholesale, and your arguments often seem to reduce to poorly-defended assertions of what you think the DFSG should mean.As I have already said in a previous message let's say we disagree. Any opinion in contradiction with yours will be "poorly defended". Some ofNope. I've had lots of debates with others on this list where the other person's position was well-defended. This is not one of them. As a case in point, you still havn't responded to Don's message which, as noted above, you elided wholesale, and still havn't replied to.
Because I have already given the opinion I have. Basically I do not believe in "bright line test" since it always lead to absurd situations. (the same apply for standard law). I am for a reading of the DFSG where we preserve the spirit. I think the ability to modify the technical part is enough; and suffices to exercice our freedom. The DFSG are somewhat vague and certainly does not require that everything can be modified without restriction. We have of course to put a line somewhere and I do not place the line at the same place as you.
The other complains is, in my opinion based on a wrong reading of the DFSG. When we read the DFSG as a whole it seems obvious that it sipmly mean that you cannot prevent people who have received the manual to exercice their right. At least in my country (Belgium); court generally pay more attention to the spirit of a contract rather than to the letters. I agree though that it would be a good idea for the FSF to remove these ambiguities.
In the case of documentation, sure: the FSF's notions of Free Documentation have diverged from Debian's. Debian feels that documentation should be held to the same standards of freedom as programs, and the FSF does not. Feel free to lobby to have that page changed, if you feel it necessary, but refrain from trying to use it as a stick to beat Debian with.
I am pretty sure that the FSF would consider a license like the GFDL free even for software (a license which oblige to attach a political text to a sofware). As seen from the old BSD license, it would probably discourage it and in this sense I agree that the FSF is not very coherent (I have never said the GFDL is a "good" license; what I say is that it is "acceptable").
For political texts; there are more fondamental difference as the FSF believe that they cannot be modified at all.
Olive