On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 05:03:09PM +1100, Craig Sanders wrote: > On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 04:13:25PM +1100, Matthew Palmer wrote: > > On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 04:02:38PM +1100, Craig Sanders wrote: > > > sorry, but that argument is bogus. convenience is NOT the same as freedom. > > > more to the point, freedom does not require convenience. > > > > Convenience and freedom are not the same, but they are related. You have > > the freedom to write a program which operates in a manner exactly the same > > as acroreader, but without some irritating bug (choose whichever one you > > like). It would be far more convenient if you had the source to acroread to > > make simply the bugfix you require, but freedom does not require > > convenience. So acroread is Free. Cool. > > no, acroread is DFSG non-free for other reasons that have nothing to do with > convenience. most notably, the complete absence of source-code, and the right > to modify and redistribute the source. Irrelevant. It doesn't matter that the process is inconvenient. Lack of source code and no permission to modify the existing article are just convenience. Nobody's denying you the freedom to rewrite a functional equivalent of acroread, or to write a program that invokes acroread as required. > > > in short, it doesn't make any practical *OR* ethical difference so it doesn't > > > matter in the slightest. > > > > I don't see much of a case at all for "no practical difference" in what you > > wrote above. The only form of "amendment" that can be made is to reissue a > > newly written RFC saying "this previous one is wrong", > > irrelevant. it doesn't matter that the process is inconvenient. > > > but your new RFC cannot be a derived work of the superceded one. > > That's a real practical difference to me. > > in theory, you may be right. in practice, nobody would give a damn - and > nobody HAS given a damn when people have done exactly that. So you're advocating the deliberate and knowing breach of copyright? > the format for an RFC is pretty much prescribed by convention if not by > explict written rule, and the data is implicit in what you're writing. given > those two conditions, any "clean room" re-implementation of an RFC is likely > to be nearly identical to a copy anyway. An RFC has sufficient creative input to merit copyright protection? An interesting claim, not one that I think I've seen before. > as long as you're not plagiarising someone else's work (i.e. claiming it as > your own or failing to give due credit), you can basically do what you want. That is not what the licence of the text says. > by your own admission, the GPL is a non-free document. why, then, is it OK to > distribute it within debian, and why is it OK to distribute other works which > depend upon it (at best, they should go in contrib)? We're not distributing the GPL as a document, we're distributing it as an exact description of the terms under which some things in Debian are allowed to be copied. We can't have a distribution without it. No such equivalent exists for any of the other non-DFSG-free crud you want to burden us with. > since you can't or won't explain it, i'll make an attempt for you: Ho, ho, ho. Can and have. As have others. > perhaps, just perhaps, the reason is that there is an implicit acknowledgement > of the fact that documents don't need to be held to the exact same standard of > freedom as software, hence it doesn't actually qualify as "non-free" (even > though it would if it were software). It's a really poor attempt, and doesn't represent my beliefs at all. - Matt
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