Re: Questions to candidates
> > What about Debian distributing documentation - do you see it as
> > software, do you see all documentation (eg. philosophical) as software?
> >
> > Eg. GFDL documentation?
> > RFCs?
>
> Another thing that would be useful to add to all questions of this
> type is something along the lines of "and as DPL, do you think you can
> do anything about it, or plan to?" to hear whether the candidates plan
> to do anything either personally or as DPL about any particular issue.
I will answer that question here.
I would like to think about documentation as if it were software, so
that I can share and tweak it to my liking. Especially if it is
technical documentation, from which I can lift examples from, and build
them into my own programs. With this pattern, the documentation needs to
be software license friendly (in my case, GPL compatible), which for
example, the GDFL is not, and as far as I remember, the RFCs aren't
either.
As DPL, one does not really have a way to change the situation though.
As a distribution, we can move all such documentation to non-free, and
let the users flame the upstream authors for not having the
documentation at hand. However, that probably wouldn't work out too
well.
So, instead of this, I intend to finally release my new branch of tama
which I've been hacking on for quite a few years (well, actually only
two), which is skinnable, themeable, and can work as a frontend to
megahal. We just need an RMS skin and theme, feed some of his speeches
to megahal, then persuade it that the GFDL is bad, and then we have a
nice RMS replacement. Then, we hire a few Bad Guys, and replace the real
RMS with my tama thingy, and bingo! It relicenses all GDFL stuff under
the GPL or a compatible license, and problems are gone!
--
Gergely `Master Tama Breeder' Nagy
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