Hereby I am proposing an amendment to the GR about GFDL opened by Anthony Towns [Sun, 01 Jan 2006 15:02:04 +1000] I wish to thank everybody who will support this amendment, especially I wish to thank those who second it. I wish to thank also the members of the Debian mailing list at lists.uni-sofia.bg, who assisted me with the text. Anton Zinoviev ------------------------------------------------------------------- GNU Free Documentation License protects the freedom, it is compatible with Debian Free Software Guidelines ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ (0) Summary This is the position of Debian Project about the GNU Free Documentation License as published by the Free Software Foundation: We consider that works licensed under GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2 do fully comply both with the requirements and the spirit of Debian Free Software Guidelines. Within Debian community there has been a significant amount of uncertainty about the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), and whether it is, in fact, a "free" license. This document attempts to explain why Debian's answer is "yes". (1) What is the GFDL? The GFDL is a license written by the Free Software Foundation, who use it as a license for their own documentation, and promote it to others. It is also used as Wikipedia's license. To quote the GFDL's Preamble: The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other functional and useful document "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others. This License is a kind of "copyleft", which means that derivative works of the document must themselves be free in the same sense. It complements the GNU General Public License, which is a copyleft license designed for free software. (2) The Invariant Sections - Main Objection Against GFDL One of the most widespread objections against GFDL is that GFDL permits works covered under it to include certain sections, designated as "invariant". The text inside such sections can not be changed or removed from the work in future. GFDL places considerable constraints on the purpose of texts that can be included in an invariant section. According to GFDL all invariant sections must be also "secondary sections", i.e. they meet the following definition A "Secondary Section" is a named appendix or a front-matter section of the Document that deals exclusively with the relationship of the publishers or authors of the Document to the Document's overall subject (or to related matters) and contains nothing that could fall directly within that overall subject. [...] The relationship could be a matter of historical connection with the subject or with related matters, or of legal, commercial, philosophical, ethical or political position regarding them. Consequently the secondary sections (and in particular the invariant sections) are allowed to include only personal position of the authors or the publishers to some subject. It is useless and unethical to modify somebody else's personal position; in some cases this is even illegal. For such texts Richard Stallman (the founder of the Free Software Movement and the GNU project and author of GFDL) says [1]: The whole point of those works is that they tell you what somebody thinks or what somebody saw or what somebody believes. To modify them is to misrepresent the authors; so modifying these works is not a socially useful activity. And so verbatim copying is the only thing that people really need to be allowed to do. This feature of GFDL can be opposed to the following requirement of Debian Free Software Guidelines: 3. Derived Works The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software. It is naive to think that in order to fulfil this requirement of DFSG the free licenses have to permit arbitrary modifications. There are several licenses that Debian has always acknowledged as free that impose some limitations on the permitted modifications. For example the GNU General Public License contains the following clause: If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. The licenses that contain the so called "advertising clause" give us another example: All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: "This product includes software developed by ..." Consequently when judging whether some license is free or not, one has to take into account what kind of restrictions are imposed and how these restrictions fit to the Social Contract of Debian: 4. Our priorities are our users and free software We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities. Currently GFDL is a license acknowledged as free by the great mass of the members of the free software community and as a result it is used for the documentation of great part of the currently available free programs. If Debian decided that GFDL is not free, this would mean that Debian attempted to impose on the free software community alternative meaning of "free software", effectively violating its Social Contract with the free software community. We should be able to improve the free software and to adapt it to certain needs and this stays behind the requirement of DFSG for modifiability. GFDL allows everybody who disagrees with a personal position expressed in an invariant section to add their own secondary section and to describe their objections or additions. This is a reasonable method to improve the available secondary sections, a method that does not lead to misrepresenting the authors opinion or to censorship. (3) Transparent copies Another objections against GFDL is that according to GFDL 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). Instead, the GFDL insists that you must somehow include a machine-readable Transparent copy (i.e., not allow the opaque form to be downloaded without the transparent form) or keep the transparent form available for download at a publicly accessible location for one year after the last distribution of the opaque form. The following is what the license says (the capitalisations are not from the original license): You must either include a machine-readable Transparent copy ALONG with each Opaque copy, or state IN OR WITH each Opaque copy a computer-network location from which the general network-using public has access to download using public-standard network protocols a complete Transparent copy of the Document, free of added material. Consequently the license requires distribution of the transparent form ALONG with each opaque copy but not IN OR WITH each opaque copy. It is a fact confirmed by Richard Stallman, author of GFDL, and testified by the common practice, that as long as you make the source and binaries available so that the users can see what's available and take what they want, you have done what is required of you. It is up to the user whether to download the transparent form. If the transparent copy is not distributed along with the opaque copy then one must take reasonably prudent steps to ensure that the Transparent copy will remain accessible from Internet at a stated location until at least one year. In these curcumstances the requirement of GPL appears to be even more severe - a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code. (4) Digital Rights Management The third objection against GFDL arises from the measures in Section 2 that attempt to overcome Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies. According to some interpretations of the license, it rules out distributing copies on DRM-protected media, even if done in such a way as to give users full access to a transparent copy of the work; and, as written, it also potentially disallows encrypting the documentation, or even storing it on a file system that supports permissions. In fact, the license says only this: You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute This clause disallows the distribution or storage of copies on DRM-protected media only if a result of that action will be that the reading or further copying of the copies is obstructed or controlled. It is not supposed to refer the use of encryption or file access control on your own copy. Consequently the measures of the license against the DRM technologies are only a way to ensure that the users are able to exercise the rights they should have according to the license. Because of that, these measures serve similar purpose to the measures taken in the GNU General Public License against the patents: If a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program. We do not think that this requirement of GPL makes GPL covered programs non-free even though it can potentially make a GPL-covered program undistributable. Its purpose is against misuse of patents. Similarly, we do not think that GFDL covered documentation is non-free because of the measures taken in the license against misuse of DRM-protected media. [1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.html [2] http://www.gnu.org/doc/gnupresspub.html
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