Re: Anton's amendment
On Wed, 01 Feb 2006 12:46:55 -0300, Margarita Manterola wrote:
> Even though I strongly disagree with Anton's position and reading of
> the DFSG, I think that the point is that the text says "allow
> modifications" and not "allow for the whole source to be modified".
> Of course, the "spirit" of the DFSG is that of allowing to modify the
> whole text, but it's not explicitly stated, and thus allows for
> unbeliavable conclusions like "Invariant Sections are free".
It is not an unbelievable conclusion. If I include your personal
position about, let's say, software freedom in my documentation under
GFDL, I have to put it in an Invariant section, otherwise people would
be able to change/twist your words and turn it into something
completely different. That is the whole purpose of these sections, if
they were not invariant, it wouldn't make sense at all.
So far I haven't seen abuse of this option (i.e. manual with many
invariant sections, representing opinions of many authors), simply
because evil people don't write free documentation and people who
write free documentation prefer to spend their time on something
useful ;-)
As explained on http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-howto.html, the
Invariant sections serve a special purpose, which is the case of the
GNU Manifesto. Many users, including myself, consider it a more
important part than the GNU Emacs Manual itself. How removing the
document, that inspired thousands to join the efforts, will make
Debian more free, I cannot tell...
Please apply some "common sense" when judging.
--
Yavor Doganov
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