Re: GFDL freedoms
On Fri, Apr 15, 2005 at 11:59:38PM +0200, David Schmitt wrote:
> On Thursday 14 April 2005 22:32, Adam McKenna wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 14, 2005 at 10:17:12PM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > > Now imagine someone who's doing a study on available algorithms for
> > > Fourier transforms, and wants to pick out parts of the text in the
> > > invariant section to write his paper.
> >
> > It seems that he could do this with a simple footnote or end note
> > referencing the document in question.
> >
> > You can do that with copyrighted text that gives you no rights at all. So
> > I'm not sure why you couldn't also do it with text licensed under the GFDL.
>
> Indeed. But this obviously then is no "free" work. Why should Debian want to
> distribute that in main?
I'm not sure what you're asking, but the point was that you don't need the
author's permission, or a license, to use quotes or cite portions of a text
in another work. I can go to a library and look in books and use information
from those books to write a paper. I can do the same thing with a document
that has been released under the GFDL.
If you're suggesting that in order to write a paper with citations from a
GFDL work I'd need to include the invariant sections in my paper, I don't
agree with that. You only need to include the invariant sections if you make
a modified version of the original work. I don't see how you could claim
that this applies to citations in a paper about a related subject.
--Adam
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