Mahesh T. Pai wrote: <snip> > I would have got a very different idea about freedom if this friend > had changed either the FSF's `political speech', or the Debian PM or > DFSG and whatever else is in doc-debian and allied packages. Well, the friend couldn't have represented it as coming from the FSF or Debian, of course.
> That this > friend had the freedom to modify the latter, but did not, is a > different issue altogether. Yes; but it perhaps emphasizes the reason why Debian is taking the view it is. <snip> > The problem for experienced users and advocates of the free software > philosophy, like me (I'm speaking for myself *only*, as an individual, > and not as a lawyer, which is what I do for a living) is that if > Debian takes out what is `free documentation' for the FSF we loose a > potent tool for spreading the concept. See, from Debian's point of view, if there were totally free documentation and free political essays Debian would include both. I assume And pretty much unmodified, too, I expect. >From the FSF's point of view, it wants to force pro-proprietary-software people who want to remove the essays to distribute them and, in fact, make them prominent. I don't think this is going to be effective... see my next question. > I would never have understood the real meaning of `free software' if > the FSF's messages were not carried in a *Debian* CD, and I read them > side-by-side with the documents in /usr/share/doc/*debian*. Would you have learned it from the FSF's messages on the Red Hat CDs (for example), since that's the kind of advocates-proprietary-software distributor who the FSF is trying to force to include its essays? > Does debian really want to deny future newbies a good intro to what > free software is by taking out all this political speech from the > /usr/share/doc? I think everyone would *love* to include it if it was freely modifiable (with any appropriate rules for attribution, of course; clearly I must not claim that anything is RMS's opinion, or that I wrote his words, but that combination of disclaimers is easy). And frankly, I don't understand why it's not. Because it's not, it means that if I want to write an essay about the importance of funding free software, I can't use any of RMS's rhetorical flourishes (and I'd be safest not reading his work at all). Perhaps RMS is worried about people spreading subtly different messages? That's happening anyway, of course. Or maybe it's just the 'my baby' phenomenon, which seems common to writers. -- There are none so blind as those who will not see.
