Re: Creative Commons 3.0 Public draft -- news and questions

[Ken Arromdee <arromdee@rahul.net>]

> >      1. Was GR 2006-01 an exception to the DFSG, or a clarification of
> >         our principles?

Consider an analogy.  An amusement park ride puts up a sign saying that
kids must be 4 feet tall to enter.  A little while later, it declares that
kids must be allowed in if they're 47 inches, and furthermore that this isn't
a change to the 4 foot rule.

Is that a clarification or an exception?

I'd say that someone who couldn't count obviously meant for it to be a
clarification.  But clarifying means choosing an interpretation of something
ambiguous; 4 feet isn't ambiguous.  They may have *meant* to clarify the rule,
but they really didn't.

The same applies to the GR.  People had well-reasoned, detailed, arguments
about why the GFDL doesn't meet the DFSG.  A GR can tell you to ignore a
valid argument, but it can't actually make the valid argument become invalid.
It can't, in other words, clarify the rules into saying something they don't
say; that isn't what a clarification is.

It's an exception which pretends to be a clarification.