[Sussex] Distros

[Steve Dobson]

Geoff

On Mon, Apr 04, 2005 at 05:44:14PM +0100, Geoffrey J. Teale wrote:
> 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.  

Can I be clear on this?  You are now suggesting that we duplicate effort
to manufacture documentation while the source code can just be copy and
augment.  Does anyone else see this oxymoronic?

I would assume that any re-writer would also not to have had read the
original documentation.  If the original author was to sue under copyright 
infringement then the re-writer would have to prove that any similarities
between the two documents was coincidence and not plagiarism.

These kinds of tricks were used at the start of the PC clone development.
Are we to return to practices of twenty years ago?  Have we learnt nothing
in that time?
 
> > 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.

And how were these lawyers consulted?  Where they asked to find a license
that is similar to the GPL but for documentation?  Or where they asked to
provide a method that would allow RMS to insert his politically views into
technical documentation and not have it removed?

Geoff, you have said publicly, in this forum, that you support Free Software
because it does not exclude developing nations from gaining IT expertise.
I completely agree with you on this point.

Some of those developing nations have laws that forbid the freedom of speech 
that RMS, you and I practice.  Let's consider that RMS has insert a political
rant as an invariant section in the FSF documentation, and that said rant is
illegal in a number developing countries.  How do we (as a community that
believe in free software, sharing with the developing world and the legal
process) deliver the documentation for software to all nations?  Can someone
only have the documentation if they take RMS's political ideology too?
That isn't all that different, to me at least, from offering aid with
conditions on where such aid is spent.

Steve