Anthony Towns wrote: > The problem with this is that most people aren't working from a > "intellectual property isn't" perspective. Debian's webpages are Debian's, > why should anyone else get any access to them? Sure, viewing them is a > good idea, but why should they be redistributable? Well, I guess mirrors > are okay. But what about modifiable? Well, translations count, but that's > pretty limited modification. Why should we allow more?
For precisely the same reasons we allow more freedoms for the software itself. > The counter-argument is to prevent people ripping off our work, or > something. For example, some unscrupulous dot-com could take all the > Debian stuff, setup www.debian.foo.xy in their country, and confuse > newbies into thinking that they're the official site. And everyone knows > that Debian would do *anything* to avoid confusing newbies, so this is > a completely unacceptable situation. This issue, the one of preserving identity, is just as real for the software. The DFSG allows licenses that prevent derivative works being distributed with the same name. I think it interesting that if we were talking about the software that many people wouldn't even blink at precisely this scenario occurring, indeed, it might even be encouraged. People take the debian software, modify all references within it to point to their own site and redistribute it. Why should the documentation be treated any differently? I should make it clear, I've no strong feeling on the debian.org web pages, although I'd personally like to see Debian apply the principles of the DFSG uniformly. I am very concerned about documentation though. > I dunno. It'd be nice to have a GNU manifesto -style document that applied > to music and books and everything, as well as just to software. Telling > us in persuasive tones how just like programmers could be paid for > services, bands could be paid for shows, or something. I'm hoping that with determined effort and example, the free software philosophy will extend into other areas of copyright application. I believe we are seeing signs of this starting to happen. This would be a bad time for us to compromise our own principles. Terry
