On Mon, Oct 15, 2001 at 07:06:22PM -0500, David Starner wrote: > If you're going to change a program, you need to/should change the > manual along with it.
I thought some more on this over breakfast, and yes, manuals should be free in all cases, but I think that the GNU FDL is "free enough" even though it doesn't allow totally changing everything, only the technical parts. There could be some non-free, verbatim-only extra documentation and tutorials in non-free, but to go in main, it has to be free. You're right. > I certainly can see a desire to change how a > program looks, or what a font includes. Fonts, as I said earlier, is functional work and should be changable, yes. How a "program looks"? Well, everybody is free to replace the logos, but I don't think e.g. Eazel would appriecate it if someone changed their logo to "sleazel". Debians own logo is non-free, for that matter. And you can't just go through the entire distribution changing GNU to XINU (Xinu is not unix, except backwards) just because "it's a funnier acronym". Well... IMO you *should* be able to do it, sure. That's not what I argue. It's if you can, currently, or if most of main is not DFSG-free. > > There's probably hundreds of non-DFSG-free data tidbits in Debian main > > already. Like licenses. > > Licenses have always been declared out of territory, since there's no > need to modify them, and we don't want to argue with various authors > over the license of the license. There's been several instances of "GPL-ripoffs", e.g. people basing their own licenses on the GNU GPL, or was I dreaming that? Sunnanvind
