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Re: A new practical problem with invariant sections?



On Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 06:32:58PM -0500, Anthony DeRobertis wrote:
> And, further, the GFDL says I must preserve invariant sections
> "unaltered in their text", not "unaltered in their octects"; I seriously
> doubt that'd count...

Would I be in violation if I was to take a GNU manual, untar it, uuencode
the GNU Manifesto, re-tar the whole thing, and distribute it?  I'm not
sure; it's not clear from the license.


(Jesus.  Prohibits renaming sections titled "History", "Acknowledgements",
and "Dedications"--if "Changes" and "Thanks" are more to the tone of the
work, forget it.  Requires *adding* an unrenamable section "History" if
it's not there.  Requires preserving all "dedications", so if I use a few
pages from another manual, and that manual says "dedicated to my mom", I
have to say "dedicated to that other guy's mom".  It requires the deletion
of any section named "Endorsements", even if it's a chapter in a business
textbook discussing endorsements, rather than a list of endorsements.  It
requires adding a copyright notice, even if you choose to place your changes
in the public domain.  It prohibits translating "History", etc. directly;
it requires that you leave it in English first, with translations forced
into parentheses.  It seems to require that HTML be "simple" and "standard-
conforming".)

Nothing new in that, just the stuff I cringed at while trying to answer
the above question.  It's sickening that people are trying so hard to cram
this license into Debian.

-- 
Glenn Maynard



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