Re: Anton's amendment
"Wesley J. Landaker" <wjl@icecavern.net> writes:
> Sure, it says it must permit modifications, but it doesn't way that it must
> permit ALL modifications. The way it reads, literally, could be interpreted
> as it must permit ALL modifcations, or as it must permit at least two
> modifications (so that "modifications" is plural).
So, would you regard a license which permitted the modification of
some features of a program, but not others, to be free? I would not.
This is why your interpretation sounds entirely ad-hoc. If you
*really* think that the correct reading of this part of the DFSG is to
say that as long as two modifications are permitted, it does not
matter what restrictions are on the rest of a program, then I think
you are proffering something so implausible it need not be considered.
> I think it's completely appropriate for the developer body to determine how
> to apply those guidelines using their own common sense and gut feel,
> without resorting to grammatical nitpicking. So a vote on this doesn't
> require any changes to what the document says, nor does it change what the
> document means. It's merely showing what how majority of developers think
> the guideliens should be applied to the GFDL.
But this must be done in a *principled* way. If you are saying simply
that thet GFDL should be subject to a *different* set of requirements
than the ones you think should be applied to programs, then you can
find no support for this position in the DFSG. Indeed, we recently
amended the DFSG *specifically for the purpose* of saying that the
same conditions apply to everything in Debian, whether a program or
documentation or something else.
Now, once more, we have people who want to change that decision. Feh,
I say, a thousand times feh.
Thomas
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