[Preston] GFDL not free?

[Matthew T. Atkinson]

'ellow,

I was hoping to make it to the last meeting but was unable to at the
last minute.  I will try and get to the next one.  Seeing as it was
about shell scripting, I thought I'd mention that I have made a few
scripts over the past few months that may be of use to people on the
list.  I am improving and testing them atm but when they're done I'll
post about it.  One of them is for cleaning out your home directory,
another for changing permissions on large trees of files/dirs.  Anyway,
my post was actually about this...

I have just read a posting by Thomas Bushnell (of HURD fame).  He spoke
out against the GFDL because he believes the licence is essentially not
free (in the GNU sense).  Then RMS ``dismissed'' him as HURD maintainer.

Its not this disagreement per se that made me e-mail about this - it is
that I am now concerned about using the GFDL as a licence for the
documentation I am (and will be) producing to go along with GPL'd
software.

I am concerned because I want my software to go into Debian eventually
but it says in that mail that Debian won't distribute GFDL'd manuals.  I
am not using any ``Invariant Sections'' in my manual so I think it might
not be all that bad, but I don't like the idea that you can't copy code
from a GFDL'd manual into GPL'd software.  The post also mentions
restrictions on the formats you have to produce your manual in, but I
never picked up on that when reading the GFDL.

Here is the posting I read:
http://lists.softwarelibero.it/pipermail/discussioni/2003-November/008465.html

I'm just wondering what your thoughts on this are, really.  If any of
you have had much experience (good or bad) with the GFDL I'd like to
know about it.  I have already released some stuff under the GFDL but as
I am the author/copyright holder I don't suppose it would be a problem
for me to re-release under the GPL or some other licence instead.

Sorry to post about what is essentially a news-type story.  I just
thought that a Linux user list would be a good place to get advice on
free licences :-).  Thanks in advance for your views,

bye just now,


-- 
Matthew T. Atkinson <matthew at agrip.org.uk>