[Sussex] GFDL

[Geoffrey J. Teale]

Simon Huggins <huggie at earth.li> writes:
--- %<-----
> *sigh*  I go to the trouble of getting the right link and writing a
> footnote which explains that gluck (the host for people.debian.org) is
> down and you snip it and then moan the link is dead.

Sorry didn't see that..


> [snip]
>
> So RMS likes his own license then ;)

He didn't write the GFDL, although he was involved in the process.

> The problem is that it's being foisted upon us for real documentation
> not just dead-tree stuff.  Documentation for things like emacs,
> autotools and so on uses this license.

---%<----

Yup.  The problem is not that at all.  The problem is that the people
at Debian don't really understand the license.  :-)

OK, that's unfair.  The Debian legal team has thought about this in
depth and I can see their point, perhaps more so than some of my colleagues.

However, you have to question the value of the freedoms in the context of
documentation as opposed to software.  In an ideal world we could have
a license that doesn't cause the problems noted in your post, but that
is the same world in which we could release everything under the BSD
license and everyone would play fair.  The goal of the GFDL is to
promote freedom without rendering documentation unusable in legal
contexts and difficult to publish.  

In reality the FSF wants to have licenses that are legally strong and
ensure important freedoms rather than all freedoms.  As I've stated
the GPL also restricts some freedoms because those freedoms are
damaging to freedom itself and to the greater good.  Debian doesn't
have a problem with the GPL because it understands software better
than it understands publishing.

In the short term at least the FSF is unlikely to abandon the greater
goals of the GFDL in favour of appeasing Debian's idealism.  

It's kind of interesting to see a discussion about the FSF being
practical and Debian being idealists, nest pa?

> Having the documentation under the GPL is fine.

No it isn't.  The GPL makes requirements on documentation that cannot
be fulfilled by a lot of textual content.  You have to make additional
declarations about the nature of "source code" in order to use it that way.  

-- 
Geoff Teale
CMed Technology            -   gteale at cmedresearch.com
Free Software Foundation   -   tealeg at member.fsf.org

/^\v/^\v/^\v/^\v/^\v/^\v/^\v/^\v/^\v/^\v/^\v/^\v/^\v/