On Fri, Jan 11, 2008 at 06:08:31AM +0100, Misko <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> was heard to say: > And because I only have 33k modem internet connection I do > not plan to add any online repository to that list. > I would be willing to download single packages that I am > interested in only if I could find URL to pass it to wget.
You can try http://packages.debian.org/<package>, which will link to direct downloads of individual .debs. > More seriously: I really would like to know what 'exactly' is > non-free with some GNU documentations, or in other words > what you can not do with it that you can do with documentation > included in debian? The fundamental problem is that GNU believes it's OK for documentation to contain large blocks of text which are unrelated to the subject of the documentation and must be preserved unmodified in any derivative. In GNU documentation the invariants are typically political texts by Richard Stallman, such as the GNU manifesto and (somewhat ironically) "Free Software Needs Free Documentation". Any derivative of the documentation has to contain these texts unmodified. This would be clearly non-free for computer programs (e.g., imagine a license which said that you must include a particular function verbatim and call it on start-up), since it means that you can't freely edit those pieces, or excerpt other parts of the software without dragging the invariants along; it's a straightforward restriction on modification and re-use. There is some dispute over what standards free documentation should be held to -- obviously GNU thinks these licenses are free -- but multiple resolutions in Debian have been passed supporting the view that we should apply the same standards to free documentation that we do to free software. Personally, I have yet to see an argument for labelling non-modifiable documentation as "free" that I found convincing. Daniel -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
