changes and standards documents

[Raul Miller <rdm@test.legislate.com>]

Transplanted from debian-private which maybe wasn't the right place to
send this originally.

Other people have already some of the concepts in this message, but
perhaps this post will still be useful.

----- Forwarded message from Raul Miller <rdm@test.legislate.com> -----

Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@datasync.com> wrote:
>  However, I do not think that standards documents (and possibly other
>  categories) benefit from being modifiable.

Before going too far with this logic, please consider several cases:

(1) standard document modified by some random person in some pointless
fashion.

(2) standard document modified to fix simple grammatical or structural
problems.

(3) standard document supplemented by some other document, either 
clarifying its use or extending the standard in some way.

(4) extracting standard text as to include as comments in some piece
of software intended to represent that standard.

(5) new standards body carrying on work left unfinished by original
standards body.

(6,7) Manoj already mentioned translations and reformatting.

There are other cases, but I think these capture at least some of the
flavors that need to be considered.

It's important to recognize that DFSG already provides a mechanism which
preserves the integrity of a standard:  that's the "you must relabel
the document if you change it" type of license.

It's also important to recognize that the DFSG does not even address the
problem of preventing buggy software.  I feel that stupid modifications
of standards documents are in some way analogous to this.

Now, perhaps there's other good ways of preserving the integrity of
a standards document without strangling the distribution of standards
excerpts or standards derivatives.  If so, I'm completely in favor
of these.  

And, pragmatically, I think we should somehow make available standards
documents which forbid either quoted extracts or derivative documents
available (for example, in non-free), as long as they're redistributable.
But I don't think we should consider such licenses to be ideal.

-- 
Raul

----- End forwarded message -----