A clarification for my interpretation of GFDL [was: Anton's amendment]
Anton Zinoviev write:
> Can you confirm that the second interpretation expresses properly
> what modifications must be allowed about a particular software
> program or documentation for it to be considered free by FSF.
>
> Notice that I intentionaly mentioned both software program and
> documentation. This was the answer by Stallman:
>
> Basically yes, though I would put it more precisely, because that
> text still has multiple interpretations.
>
> The license must give us permissions to modify the work in
> order to adapt it to various needs or to improve it, with no
> substantive limits on the nature of these changes, but there
> can be superficial requirements on how they are packaged.
>
> Ofcourse we have the right to have our own opinion, opinion that
> differs from the opinion of FSF. [...]
The current opinion of FSF, at least. In the past, RMS has
worked against advertising clauses far less obnoxious than
the FDL ones. You could summarise what's happening today with
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html and doing s/BSD/FDL/g;
s/sentence/chapter/g; s/system/manual/g;
s/University of California/GNU Manifesto/g and similar:
:: If other developers who used BSD-like licenses had copied the BSD
:: advertising clause verbatim--including the sentence that refers to the
:: University of California--then they would not have made the problem
:: any bigger.
::
:: But, as you might expect, other developers did not copy the clause
:: verbatim. They changed it, replacing ``University of California'' with
:: their own institution or their own names. The result is a plethora
:: of licenses, requiring a plethora of different sentences.
::
:: When people put many such programs together in an operating system,
:: the result is a serious problem. Imagine if a software system required
:: 75 different sentences, each one naming a different author or group
:: of authors.
(Yes, we're working in our "spare time" to seek relicensing FDL'd work.
FSF could free up much time for new work by fixing FDL today.)
FDL seems like an attempt to sell adverts to attract legacy publishers.
Has it worked?
--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
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