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Fwd: Re: GFDL freedoms

  This shoulda gone here too (Matthew, you can forward my other message if you 
want to forward your reply).

  Daniel
-- 
/------------------- Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> ------------------\
|         "Systems in which an event can happen before itself do            |
|          not seem to be physically meaningful." -- Leslie Lamport         |
\--- Be like the kid in the movie!  Play chess! -- http://www.uschess.org --/
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  But a few more substantive comments.

On Thursday 14 April 2005 10:11 am, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > This conflicts with "Derived Works" by denying
> > some modifications (and do most understand that as "permit
> > all reasonable modifications"?)
>
> I think it's reasonable to deny some modifications.  "Derived Works"
> doesn't say "must allow any modifications".  Just like the GPL denies
> some freedoms in order to preserve others.

  (a) the GPL does not restrict the user's freedom to make changes based on 
the content of the changes, only based on how they can be licensed.  Debian 
has traditionally defended the right to alter any part of main aside from 
license text.

  (b) What freedom is being defended here?  The "freedom" to have RMS' essays, 
however fine they may be, shoved into every piece of documentation I read?

> > and it also contradicts
> > with "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" because no
> > topic of a secondary section can used as the main purpose.
>
> I don't think that's an interesting case though.  Why would you take a
> document that has nothing to do with a particular subject and turn it
> into a document that has that subject as its main purpose?  That seems
> ludicrous to me.  Put another way: why is that a freedom you want to have?

  If I am writing a history of the politics of free software and want to 
include RMS' essays (unmodified!), I believe that I can't use the FDL'd copy 
due to the secondary section requirement.  Is that correct?

  In this case I could get the copy off the website, but we have not 
traditionally based our judgements of freeness on whether you could get a 
differently-encumbered copy of the $THING from somewhere else.

> > On another issue, these fdocg are still incompatible with
> > the anti-DRM parts of FDL and not entirely clear about the
> > post-download availability problem.
>
> It seems to me that the anti-DRM parts of the FDL that we have problems
> with are just bugs in the licence and stand a good chance of being
> removed from a future revision.  The post-download availability problem
> also just seems like a bug to me rather than a hardline philosophical
> issue.  So I don't want to accept these bits of the FDL.

  Agreed.

-- 
/------------------- Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> ------------------\
|          Almost Winter, Winter, Still Winter, and Construction.           |
\--------------------- A duck! -- http://www.python.org --------------------/

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