Re: Anton's amendment
On Tue, 2006-02-07 at 09:42, Anton Zinoviev wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 07, 2006 at 09:21:58AM -0800, Mike Bird wrote:
> >
> > It seems to me that there an awful lot of potential *practical*
> > problems with invariant sections in documents.
> >
> > They may contain outdated, narrow, or even dangerous advice or
> > code examples. For example: code fragments written against
> > obsolete APIs in other packages, scripts which work with standard
> > dev but not with udev, or insecure methods of temp file creation.
>
> GFDL doesn't allow these to be part of an invariant section. All
> invariant sections are required to be secondary sections and the
> secondary sections deal exclusively with the relationship of the
> publishers or authors to Document's overall subject (or related
> matters). The secondary sections may not contain anything that could
> fall directly within that overall subject. Acording to the license
> the relationship could be a matter of historical connections, of
> legal, commercial, philosophical, ethical or political position.
I think I could accidently or deliberately slip something nasty
into a GFDL invariant section. For example, a manual for some
application could contain a polemic on the security advantages
of open source which lauded an open source encryption algorithm
that had subsequently been cracked.
However, looking beyond GFDL, my thought is that Debian should
define invariant sections as non-free except for some *specific*
exceptions, e.g. for a concise reference to the license and/or
copyright holder(s). I would expect Debian's list to be much
narrower than GFDL's list.
--Mike Bird
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