Glenn Maynard wrote:
On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 01:23:28PM +0200, cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis) wrote:Is there an overview page of arguments (and debunkments) somewhere, that we can point people to? Or is everyone currently on their own in finding the pearls of wisdom buried in long threads on mailinglists most of our users don't follow?I asked that on d-legal recently (in response to the seventieth "license texts are unmodifiable, so we should give up and allow everything to be!"- esque argument, if I remember correctly), and Jacobo Tarrio started work on a FAQ. I havn't looked at it much yet; my impression is that it's too verbose--such a thing needs to be as brief as possible to convey the point, or it won't work very well--but I havn't had time yet to put together any suggestions. The most convincing arguments are the ones that have been presented on lists, in the course of discussions, and extracting those is probably the best bet--except that the particularly well-thought-out responses are buried among a couple thousand other mails ...
I have read all these arguments and the one that are apparently the strongest one is the presense of the "invariant sections". These invariants section must not concern the technical aspect of the documentation which can be modified.
The preamble of the GPL is totally similar to an invariant section: it express political opnion (and nothing or few about the licence itself) and cannot be changed nor removed. The advertising close of the old BSD license is free (by rule nr 10 of the social contract) and cannot be modified nor removed.
There is also the aspect of the DRM; but I think one can consider that it applies only to version we distribute and not to our own private copy (at least such a reading is in the spirit of the licence and the view of the FSF; moreover I doubt it would be juridically valid to prevent what users can do with their own copies).
I admit that some other people might have different opinions as me, but I would be happy to see what they answer to my arguments. Most of the time it is presented as if we can make anything we like invariant, making the documentation not free, but it is actually not at all the case: the technical aspect of the documentation can be modified.
Olive