Georg C. F. Greve <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > || On Mon, 14 Apr 2003 10:12:53 -0400 > || Peter S Galbraith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >> Interpretation B -- which you probably meant -- is already > >> included in the analysis, as cutting out parts is also > >> modification. > > psg> If I write a GUI front-end for some software which has > psg> documentation under this license, can I take a few paragraphs of > psg> the documentation to use under my "help" menu without including > psg> invariant sections? > > This is mixing two independent questions -- that of writing a GUI to > display text (software, potentially under GPL) and that of which text > (documentation, potentially under GFDL) you display in which way.
Don't put into my mouth. My example is _not_ a GUI to text (e.g. like xpdf) but a GUI to software. I'm more interested in hardcoding docs into software, producing a derived work composed of both works. > If we ignore potential DMCA/EUCD/SW-patent issues, which are unrelated > to the issue at hand, it is always okay to write a GUI that can > display documents regardless of their license. I'm not interested in displaying text available separately on the system, but rather in having my GUI display hardcoded relevant bits of documentation (as a quick reference for example, or as quick start primer). > If this GUI would deliberately detect GFDL'ed documents and hide > information from the user, it might be made to violate the license of > the documentation -- I'd have to think about this some more to come to > a final conclusion -- but generally, this seems an issue of the user > of the software, not the author. This is not a xpdf-like documentation browser, so I'll refrain from replying to this. > In the special case that you seem to be referring to, which is as > author of a specialized help GUI, you could of course jump to the > relevant paragraphs/parts of the documentation directly. > > That would make the relevant information immediately accessible > without requiring to hide or remove any part of the document. I don't want to ship the 5MB documentation with my 100KB GUI, just the few paragraphs that matter. > Hiding or even removing parts of the documentation doesn't seem > necessary for that and in general does not seem like a useful job for > the author of a GUI. > > The decision of what a user wants to read should be made by the user, > not by the author of his or her software. The decision of what documentation in embed in a GUI should be made by the GUI author, not by the author of the document that information is copied from. This is where we differ. I think you have addressed and confirmed my concern very well: - Documents under the FDL with invariant sections cannot be merged into the software they are supposed to document. The FDL prohibits it. The only way I could it would be to include the text and I don't want, but I can't anyway because the software license (GPL in this example) prohibits me from adding these restrictions on derived works. That is reason enough for me to avoid this license. I also think the restrictions are onerous enough to make it non-free, and not simply free but GPL-incompatible. It's _very_ weird to have to convince a GNU representative of these issues. Peter
