On Tue, Jan 10, 2006 at 04:55:43AM +0100, Adeodato Simó wrote: > I propose an amendment to this GR, consisting in replacing the > existing text with the one below. (The purpose being to indicate the GFDL only needs to be in non-free due to invariant sections. This would be nice if it were true; it's not clear to me that it is though) > Problems of the GFDL > -------------------- It'd seem like a good idea to split it into "why the GFDL is non-free" and "other problems of the GFDL that ought to be fixed, but don't really bother us". > I. The DRM Restriction > (c) As written, it would outlaw actions like changing the permission > of a copy of the document on your machine, storing it on an > encrypted file system, distributing a copy over an encrypted > link (Obstruct or control the reading is not clarified to apply > merely to the recipient), or even storing it on a file-sharing > system with non-world-readable permissions. If we're taking this literally, this seems to make it non-free to me by restricting how it can actually be used. I guess I'm not personally opposed to just pretending it doesn't exist, but... > II. Transparent And Opaque Copies > Section 3 (Copying in Quantity) of the GFDL states that it is not > enough to just put a transparent copy of a document alongside with the > opaque version when you are distributing it (which is all that you > need to do for sources under the GPL, for example). The way we distribute source and binaries doesn't meet this requirement; so allowing this seems like it implies a pretty serious change to how we manage source, one way or another. The way things works at the moment, we'd have to interpret that as a prohibition (for our purposes) on distributing "compiled" GFDL docs, which presumably would (for our purposes) violate the "must allow distribution in ... compiled form" requirement of the DFSG. Changing the way things work at the moment isn't necessarily out of the question, but seems a lot of hassle when it won't save the FSF GFDL docs that usually do include invariant sections anyway. Cheers, aj
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