Re: DFSG4 and combined works
Anton Zinoviev <anton@lml.bas.bg> writes:
> On Thu, Feb 09, 2006 at 01:54:27PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
>>
>> It does prohibit some modifications which are useful.
>>
>> Geez, reference cards. Useful!
>
> You can make reference cards but if you make more than 100 copies you
> have to accompany the reference cards with additional sheet(s) of
> paper. The other licenses have the same limitation - you may not
> distribute the reference cards alone. Depending on the license you
> may be required to accompany each reference card with the full text of
> the license, with history who and when has edited the document, with
> the sources in machine readable format, various copyright notices, etc.
The Emacs Manual requires rather more than one additional sheet of
paper. If a small footnote could handle it, that would be fine.
>> Docstrings. Useful! Not prohibited by other free licenses! Wow!
>
> I don't understand what you mean by "docstrings".
Many programs, including GNU Emacs, include strings as part of the
program which document the behavior of the program. (This is what is
printed out when you use C-h f, for example.)
Suppose gdb didn't already have docstrings, and you wanted to add them
using text from the GDB manual. You would not be allowed to do this,
because use of that manual text invokes the GFDL, and would require
including the invariant sections in the program. This would
contradict the GPL (because the GFDL and the GPL are incompatible).
But this is not merely a license incompatibility. If GDB were under
the BSD license, you still couldn't do this and have a free program,
because the standards for free programs (even by the FSF's definition)
are that they can't carry around invariant sections and still be a
free program.
When this problem was pointed out to the FSF, the response was that
the manual author could just relicense the text so that you could put
it in your program. This is of course irrelevant, but explains why
the FSF doesn't see the problem.
Thomas
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