[Sussex] Distros

[Geoffrey J. Teale]

Steve Dobson <steve at dobson.org> writes:

> But person B could not only add good technical content to a GFDL document
> but also an invariant section that is morally objectionable.  And the
> GFDL does not allow you to accept the technical good without taking the
> invariant bad.  This is what I object to.

True, and it's a valid point.  

> If that author has added detailed documentation for a software patch that
> I do want then I can't use said documentation unless I take the invariant
> stuff too.  If I can't legally or morally accept the invariant section then
> I can't take the documentation, and what use is the software without it?
> And I can't just re-write the documentation, that would be a derived work,
> and I have no license to do that.  What am I to do?

You can write documentation from scratch based on the software in front
of you for which you have the source.  

> While I accept the need to make documentation licenses that work in the
> real world I still do not accept that invariant sections are the way to
> do this.  There must be a better way.  Geoff, your wife is a lawyer, isn't
> there a better way?

Just to be clear.  Some of the better IP lawyers in the world were
consulted in the production of the GFDL.  The FSF spends a lot of
money on exactly this kind of work.  if there really was a better way
to do it then it should have been found and there is, of course, an
ongoing push to improve the licenses.  Everyone at the FSF is open to
suggestions, but there's no way the FSF would abandon the benefits of
the GFDL just to make it easier to solve these problems.

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

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