Re: License of old GNU Emacs manual
On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 04:45:34PM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> I've Cc:ed this to -project - followups should probably go there.
>
> On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 10:24 -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
>
> > Either way, the people who are pushing the strict DFSG above all else
> > have to see that the fundamental problem is that there are useful bits
> > out there that Debian users will want to use (such as the autoconf
> > documentation --- if someone hasn't issued an ITP for it in non-free
> > yet, I will, soon, because I need it), that are licensed under
> > licenses that do not meet a strict interpretation of the DFSG.
>
> I agree that interpretations of the DFSG that remove large quantities of
> material that we've previously thought of as free software are wrong,
> and I'm on record as being opposed to various attempts to do so. But
> DFSG 4 requires us to be able to modify content. We're willing to bend
> that somewhat due to requirements that the GPL and older BSD licenses
> have, but I don't believe that objecting to the existence of large and
> unmodifiable sections of political content that can't even be removed is
> a desperately strict interpretation of the DFSG.
why not? we allow it for software, so why not for documentation?
in case it's not obvious what i'm talking about, we (grudgingly) allow
software which only allows distribution of modifications by patch. this is in
no way different to adding extra material which modifies or refutes an
invariant section, or even a patch which changes it after installation.
> > P.S. Besides, given that the Debian Logo needs to go into non-free,
> > since the terms governing its use are also not DFSG compliant, who are
> > we really trying to kid?
>
> I think that that's an argument for the logo being under the wrong
> license (and hence us having fucked up in the past) rather than the DFSG
> being wrong.
actually, it's just a natural consequence of wanting to protect the logo and
the trademark from misuse by scumbags -- "scumbags" being defined as anyone
who would want to misrepresent themselves or whatever they're doing as being
an official part of the debian project, regardless of whether what they are
doing is compatible with or contradictory to our aims or not.
craig
--
craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> (part time cyborg)
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