Raul Miller wrote:
On 2/13/06, Craig Sanders <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
you people never give up, do you? as soon as one bogus claim against
the GFDL is disproved, you recycle another one that was demolished
months, weeks, or only days ago. repeat ad nauseum.
Another possibility is that you're begging the question.
(Begging the question means: assuming your conclusion
is true in your argument about why the conclusion is true.)
How about we try a different approach:
Let's say that we want GFDL'd documentation to be a part
of main. (That's going to be true for at least some people in
the project.)
How do we describe what it is that we want? Do we need
to keep an arbitrary list of licenses, and everything that's
on that list is "OK"? Do we just want to use the non-free
criteria (everything that we can legally distribute)?
In every matter, it is virtually impossible to write a rule that can
mechanically be interpreted to give a suitable result. For normal law,
the judge have the ability to interpret the laws as long as the
interpretation conforms to the spirit and the original will of the law.
The same must be applied with the DFSG and the central question should
be "can we practically exercise our freedom" and I think the answer is
yes for the GFDL even if there can be inconvenience. The preamble of the
GPL is also some king of invariant section: it says nothing about the
license itself but has only political claims:
[...]
The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to
share and change it.
[...]
When I say that, a lot of people (which I would call zealots) say that
this argument is irrelevant and must not be discussed because it is
obvious that the license is not the software and must be keep intact.
But this shows at least that there can be "sequence of octets" which are
not the software itself and must be preserved. I claim that the
invariant sections is just the same: it is not part of the documentation
(this is required by the GFDL) and there must be preserved.
For the people who don't agree, I would kindly ask them to say if they
would consider free a license which give you all the freedoms you like
but must be preserved intact if this license contains a preamble of
length similar to the invariant section of GFDL? I have ask the question
in the past but nobody have answered because it was a "facile" argument.
But if this argument is "facile"; please answer.
The other objections of the GFDL (DRM, etc...) is based on a bogus
reading of the GFDL.
Olive
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