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Re: A Position Statement from the Debian project re: DFSG/GNU FDL



On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 03:29:13PM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>  Please visit
>  <URL:http://people.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml>
> 
>        Any comments, feedback, suggested wording, and proof reading
>  appreciated. 

Some comments:

> Transparent and Opaque copies
> [...]
> Instead, the GFDL insists that you must somehow include a
> machine-readable Transparent copy  (i.e., not allow the opaque form to
> be downloaded without the transparent form) or keep the transparent form
> available for one year after the last distribution of the opaque form.

From this little paragraph I can't really see the problem here. I think
you should more emphasize that "available" means "[available at] a
computer-network location from which the general network-using public 
has access to". Otherwise it is not obvious where this differ from the
GPL requirement to make the source code available (on request) for
three years after distributing a binary.
(The next two paragraphs only talk about the sentence before the "or" so
they don't help either.)

> Invariant Sections
> [...]
>  Being unable to use material from the document for a new document
>  whose primary topic is that of an Invariant Sections (because the
>  Invariant Section must be retained, and must be Secondary, but would
>  no longer be Secondary). This issue, where it can be very difficult
>  or impossible to repurpose chunks (eg copy regexp chapter), is a
                                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>  significant degradation of freedom.

Perhaps it is my bad English but I don't understand what you mean with
this expression. Do you mean "copy a chapter about regular expressions"?

>  There is some concern that the requirements to list the authors of
>  the modification on the title page and the history sectrions of the
>  GFDL covered work appear to prohibit anonymous modifications to a
>  document. (This may fail the Chinese Dissident Test).

This paragraph is appended to the "Invariant Sections" part but seems
not directly related to it. I see that it is to short to warrant an own
section but just appending it to the wrong section feels not right.
If only I had a better suggestion :/

Gruesse,
-- 
Frank Lichtenheld <frank@lichtenheld.de>
www: http://www.djpig.de/

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