Re: documentation x executable code
On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 10:56:57AM +0100, Peter Vandenabeele wrote:
> The way it is presented here, makes perfect sense to me. The author must
> have the right to keep certain "background/political/philosophical" parts of
> his text (secondary) invariant, while allowing all needed updates, additions,
The author of a program must have the right to keep certain "background/
political/philosophical" parts of his program invariant.
Well, yes, it's true that an author does have the right to do so; but
if he does so, the work is not Free. For a work to be free, I must be
able to modify it however I see fit, which includes removing irrelevant
political spiels, or changing them to say something the original author
strongly disagrees with. A free work may require that, in doing so, I
do not misrepresent (accidentally or otherwise) the result as that of
the original author, but it can not prevent the modification itself.
> reductions to the "main body" (primary) text. If you don't like the "political"
> views of the author, well too bad, then don't use his text. Similar
If you don't like proprietary software, well too bad, don't use it. Right;
Debian doesn't like proprietary software, and doesn't use (ship) it, and it
shouldn't ship this non-free documentation for the same reasons.
> * in source code of a program, the code _itself_ is the subject matter. The
> code itself is all and everything. Since there is no relationship with an
> _external_ entity, you don't cause direct damage to an external entity by
> changing the code (well, you can break functionality of this code, in
> collaboration with something else, but you are not _directly_ hurting some
> external code or entity).
Sure you can. If you modify the program in a bad way, and misrepresent the
changes as being those of the original author, you can damage that person's
reputation. That's why many free software licenses require that changed
versions be marked as such, and why DFSG#4 explicitly permits this. It's
also why some people refuse to release their work as Free Software.
> * in documentation, you are writing _about_ something _external_. So you
> can _directly_ hurt something external by misrepresentation, by e.g.
> putting wrong words in some-one's mouth or "censoring" his political,
> philosophical views.
This isn't the issue. Again, as above, a free work can prevent misrepresentation
without prohibiting modification altogether.
> Or you can cause confusion by distributing a patched
> version of an RFC.
And here, too, you can require that the modified version not pretend to
be the original document.
> So, I conclude that the Debian license scheme should cater in some way for
> allowing invariant sections as part of the documentation (but not
> necessarily in the "main" section if that violates the Social Contract).
Of course, non-free documentation can and does go in non-free. I'm
not quite sure what your position is (above you seem to say invariant
text is acceptable, here you seem to say that it isn't), but either way,
this is already the case (or will be, once GR 2004-003 kicks back in).
> An interesting consequence of this proposal is that a Copy-Exact of
> the GPL License could not longer go into main (as it is essentially
> one large invariant section. I quote from GPL:
> "Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
> of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.")
This is false. I suggest you read the rest of the thread to see why,
or any of the other three or four hundred times people have tried to
convince us that Free Software is hopeless and we should just give
up by claiming that license documents can't go in main.
--
Glenn Maynard
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