Re: Amendment to GR on GFDL, and the changes to the Social Contract
Xavier Roche <roche@httrack.com>
> On Thu, 9 Feb 2006, J=E9r=F4me Marant wrote:
> > I'd propose to revert this and clearly define what software is.
>
> I fully agree. The "Holier than Stallman" stuff is really getting
> ridiculous. After the firmware madeness, now the documentation madeness.
[...]
Stallman is amazingly arbitrary and illogical about manuals and
invariant sections, ignoring Moglen's advice that we can't rely on
distinguishing bitstreams for deciding what freedoms are important.
I welcome debian's consistent approach: if it's in main, it should
follow the DFSG (at least in spirit as far as possible), no matter
what sort of software it is (programs, manuals, and so on).
Stallman tries to redefine software=programs and many follow.
It's not about "holier than Stallman" but about what we understand
as software. Just programs for PCs, programs for everything (inc.
firmware), or computerised creative work in general?
Software is a wider group than programs: if you know esperanto,
software is programaroj rather than programoj. Unfortunately,
similar arguments seem to happen for many languages, including
French: do programme and logiciel differ for computers?
The FSF promotion of the FDL looks like a fairly obvious example of
working against FSF's aim, but I don't know their precise objective.
FDL looks like a fairly cynical attempt to create an adware licence
acceptable to legacy dead-tree publishers and few of them seem to use
it. Someone mentioned the "encyclopedia problem" where including an
invariant section on a topic prevents text being reused in a manual
about that topic: that's just one of the more obvious problems.
I believe the debates about program copyrights, computer-stored music,
video and so on are essentially the same. The same freedoms fit.
--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
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