Re: The invariant sections are not forbidden by DFSG
On Tue, Jan 31, 2006 at 08:59:08PM +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
>
> >> That makes more than 20 pages of invariant sections, or less than 13% of
> >> interesting material. Do you agree that the GNU Emacs Manual is non-free?
> >
> > It is free. 20 pages do not obstruct the users to exercise their
> > freedoms.
>
> I believe that 12 times 20 pages do obstruct the freedom.
If you have 12 documents each with 20 pages invariant sections and all
invariant sections are different then this would indeed result in 12
times 20 pages in the combined document. For a printed document that
would be impractical. (I'm sorry that I didn't come to that
conclusion from your previous posts but this situation appears to me
very unlikely. In most real cases GFDL won't cause that many
invariant sections.)
It is always a great inconvenience to be unable to combine two or more
free works into one. Nevertheless this can not be a reason to
consider these works non-free. For example, if the licenses are
incompatible then it is impossible and illegal to combine such works.
Notice however that we accept as free some licenses that do not allow
combined works in principle -- that is you can have two works covered
by same license and yet, you are not allowed to combine them. An
example of such license is the Q Public License (QPL). The sources of
all derived works should be distributed in the form
original_source+patch so if you have two works covered by QPL then
there is no permissible way to distribute the source of the combined
work (unless the combined work is merely aggregation of independent
derivatives of both works).
> > (Although it can be forbiddable if you want to donate large
> > quantity of printed documents to your students.)
>
> So the freedom to give away documents to students is not important, or
> what?
The convenience to give away copies is important but not something we
can use to determine whether some work is free or not. In some cases
you can give only 10 copies without much inconvenience, in other cases
you can give 100 copies and in other cases you can give more than 1000
copies. The only difference is how big the number is and the license
is only one of many factors that have influence on that number.
> > Now seriously. I meant a text that is considered offensive by most of
> > the users, not by the authorities. If the authorities ban some
> > document due to its contents, the effect would be similar to that of a
> > free program that is encumbered by patents in some countries.
>
> The effect is the same, but the reason is different: In one case the
> developers where not careful enough about choosing their algorithms, or
> the patent law in this country is so strict that there's no way out. In
> the other case, the developers deliberately chose to make the text
> non-distributable in this country.
OK.
Anton Zinoviev
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