Hello,
After my amendment to the GFDL GR was accepted, there was a bit of
discussion about the majority requirement that should be put on it. In
a nutshell, this is what happened:
- in what may have been a bad decision but seemed appropriate at the
time, I wrote the amendment from a "Position Statement" point of
view, and concentrated on what we'd be doing, and overlooked being
particularly clear on the internals of such actions.
- the Secretary's best judgment was that the wording implied a
modification of the Social Contract ("an exception is being made
for some non-free works"), and thus in fulfillment of his duties
put a 3:1 majority requirement on the amendment.
- several people expressed the view that they interpreted the wording
differently, as in "it states that some GFDL-licensed works meet
the DFSG, and thus are suitable for main", for which a 1:1
majority would be enough.
- the Secretary expressed his willingness to adjust the majority
requirement if the wording of the amendment was corrected to
remove the ambiguity; this is where we are now.
So here's a revised version of the original amendment, which Manoj has
ACK'ed, and for which I expect to receive soon the necessary ACKs from
my original seconders (CC'ed) so that it can replace the previous one.
Apart from clarifying the wording of paragraph 2, I've dropped the
"Problems of the GFDL" section, which results in a much more brief and
straightforward statement. All the relevant information about the
invariant sections problem is in the first paragraph anyway, and I
don't see much point in carrying details about the other two issues,
when they don't affect us at all. (This has been discussed elsewhere,
but if somebody does still have concerns over the DRM clause, or the
Transparent Copies one, I guess we can go over them again.)
Thanks.
-----------------------------------8<-----------------------------------
Debian and the GNU Free Documentation License
=============================================
This is the position of the Debian Project about the GNU Free Documentation
License as published by the Free Software Foundation:
1. We consider that the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2
conflicts with traditional requirements for free software, since it
allows for non-removable, non-modifiable parts to be present in
documents licensed under it. Such parts are commonly referred to as
"invariant sections", and are described in Section 4 of the GFDL.
As modifiability is a fundamental requirement of the Debian Free
Software Guidelines, this restriction is not acceptable for us, and
we cannot accept in our distribution works that include such
unmodifiable content.
2. At the same time, we also consider that works licensed under the
GNU Free Documentation License that include no invariant sections
do fully meet the requirements of the Debian Free Software
Guidelines.
This means that works that don't include any Invariant Sections,
Cover Texts, Acknowledgements, and Dedications (or that do, but
permission to remove them is explicitly granted), are suitable for
the main component of our distribution.
3. Despite the above, GFDL'd documentation is still not free of
trouble, even for works with no invariant sections: as an example,
it is incompatible with the major free software licenses, which
means that GFDL'd text can't be incorporated into free programs.
For this reason, we encourage documentation authors to license
their works (or dual-license, together with the GFDL) under the
same terms as the software they refer to, or any of the traditional
free software licenses like the the GPL or the BSD license.
----------------------------------->8-----------------------------------
--
Adeodato Simó dato at net.com.org.es
Debian Developer adeodato at debian.org
Ara que ets la meva dona, te la fotré fins a la melsa, bacona!
-- Borja Álvaro a Miranda Boronat en «Chulas y famosas»
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