Re: Anton's amendment

[Yavor Doganov <yavor@doganov.org>]

On Mon, 06 Feb 2006 16:37:20 +0100, Frank Küster wrote:

> "Zephaniah E. Hull" <warp@aehallh.com> wrote:
> 
>> So, I write a program, nice, big, with a license that says that you can
>> do anything you want with it as long as you keep the copyright
>> statements attached and don't make any changes at all to main.c, none,
>> not for bug fixing, not for feature changes, none at all.
>>
>> Oh, and you are not allowed to delete it or keep it from being linked in
>> either.
>>
>> Would you consider this license free?  If so, you're an idiot because
>> it's not even close.
> 
> s/main.c/secondary.c/, but that doesn't change the argument, only the
> name, actually.  Which is part of GFDL's problem.

This is not a proper example.  Non-modifiability of secondary.c may
obstruct further improvements of the program.  This is not the case
with the invariant sections, which do not prevent the manual to be
enhanced.  Like the following example:

#!/usr/bin/make -f
# debian/rules file - for debian/keyring
# Based on sample debian/rules file - for GNU Hello (1.3).
# Copyright 1994,1995 by Ian Jackson.
# Copyright 1998-2003 James Troup
# I hereby give you perpetual unlimited permission to copy,
# modify and relicense this file, provided that you do not remove
# my name from the file itself.  (I assert my moral right of
# paternity under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.)
# This file may have to be extensively modified

Is it free?  I am sure it is.  
Imagine that it contained "...provided that you do not remove my name
from the file and the statement `Dominación mundial de Debian'"; what
would happen then?  You would be still allowed to make whatever
modifications you want to your debian/rules, but it will contain a
personal statement -- no problem at all (except some inconvenience).

As for Zephaniah's first example: if you have to remove everything,
you obviously don't need this documentation and it would be much
better to write a new manual from scratch.  Thus you can avoid the
invariant sections.

-- 
Yavor Doganov