Re: What RMS says about standards (was: [rms@gnu.org: Re: Questions regarding free documentation.]

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On 19 Aug 1998 john@dhh.gt.org wrote:

> Manoj writes:
> > I beg to disagree with this assesment. I was under the
> > imprtession that we were moving towards the verbatim solution; with
> > allowances being made to ensure that licenses were distributed with
> > the software that required them.
> 
> I thought that we had pretty much agreed on verbatim but that there was
> still some disagreement as to whether it should viewed as part of main.
> I think it should.

IMHO, if verbatim is part of main then there is no "verbatim" as such.

I think everything on which we agreed was that the "Debian Document
Guidelines" (still to be written) should not be the exactly the same as
our already existing Debian Free Software Guidelines.

In practice, one of the main points about main is that you can *sell* it
and this is one of the main reasons why non-free packages are moved out of
main. People and CD vendors do not usually modify almost any of the
packages. And the fact that we ship only free software in main does not
mean that people can ignore the non-modifiable clause of the GPL itself,
for example.

I think we could live having the GPL and other non-modifiable documents
in main, without the need to create another section for them.

Our current promise about main is:

"All the *software* in main comply with the DFSG".

We can extend this promise to something like:

"All the documents non-directly related to software in main comply with
the DDG" [to be written].

and then we would not need any additional section.

Thanks.

-- 
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