Re: The invariant sections are not forbidden by DFSG
On Tue, Jan 31, 2006 at 04:34:19PM +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
>
> May I ask you to please read the mails you answer to? If you do, you'll
> know.
If I did something wrong, that was not intentional. You wrote about
some document with 9MB invariant sections.
> That makes more than 20 pages of invariant sections, or less than 13% of
> interesting material. Do you agree that the GNU Emacs Manual is non-free?
It is free. 20 pages do not obstruct the users to exercise their
freedoms. (Although it can be forbiddable if you want to donate large
quantity of printed documents to your students.)
> > The invariant sections with offensive material give us a similar
> > example -- documents that contain such invariant section would
> > also be non-free.
>
> The GNU manifesto might well be considered offensive by the authorities
> of some not-so-hypothetical country.
Then I guess the web-pages of Debian would also be considered
offensive in this country. :-)
Now seriously. I meant a text that is considered offensive by most of
the users, not by the authorities. If the authorities ban some
document due to its contents, the effect would be similar to that of a
free program that is encumbered by patents in some countries.
> I don't think that RMS would appreciate if the part from the Emacs
> manual would not only come immediately after the one from the Foo
> manual, but somewhere 40 pages down his Manifesto would follow
> immediately after Michael Foo's "Why GNU is bad Manifesto" with only
> a small note saying "End of invariant sections from the Foo manual"
> and "Beginning of invariant sections from the Emacs manual".
I don't know how much RMS would appreciate this, but it doesn't
matter. :-) Acording to GFDL you don't even need to put the notices
"End of invariant sections from the Foo manual" and "Beginning of
invariant sections from the Emacs manual".
> That will probably the case. Moreover, I have the feeling that the GFDL
> is incompatible with itself in the sense that I can't have more than one
> front cover text.
The cover should contain all cover texts in arbitrary order. If there
is no enough space to fit legibly all cover texts then they should
continue onto the adjacent pages.
> but still a ratio of 87% of rubbish is a bit high. I think this
> would make it not just inconvenient, but instead non-free. For
> example, even copying costs forbid to to distribute 11 sheets of
> paper to a group of students if I want to hand them out a 2-pages
> condensed version of the above nearly-3-pages section on coding
> selection in Emacs.
This cost can not be avoided even if it was only due to the long
license text. You can print the invariant sections with small font as
far as this doesn't obstruct the user's reading. It is probably
illegal to print the license with a small font.
Anton Zinoviev
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