Richard Stallman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It makes no sense to apply the same standards to political and legal > text as to technical material. Ethically they are different > situations. Software and documentation are functional works--they > exist to do a job. The users have a right to control the functional > material so they can make it do the jobs they want to do. This reason > doesn't apply to political statements. I put my political essays > under a license that permits only verbatim copying because in my view > that's proper for for political essays.
That's fine when your political essay is distributed by itself. When you include it and its license into a functional work, don't you agree that you have tainted the functional work? > It was clear from an early stage that companies might package parts of > GNU with non-free software and would present the non-free software to > the users as something legitimate and desirable. (This problem is > getting bigger, not smaller: today, nearly all packagers of GNU/Linux > distribute non-free software with it and try to argue it is a good > thing.) But you are doing the same thing by tainting the free work with non-free content. You are packaging non-free components with free ones. Worse, you have tainted the free work and it can't be separated and become free again. At least I can separate out the GPL'ed bits from the package that a compagny might ship along with non-free parts. > So we had to search for ways to make sure that our message > saying non-free software is wrong would at least be present in the GNU > packages that they redistribute. We did this by putting invariant > political statements into programs and manuals. In programs, these > statements are included in the license text, in the preamble to the > GPL. In manuals, they are separate sections. They still introduce non-freeness into a free work, whether you find the reason justifiable or not. > When we make decisions in the GNU Project about what counts as free > software, or free documentation, they are based looking at freedom as > a practical question, not as an abstract mathematical one. As a practical consequence, I can't make a reference card from the Emacs manual, nor can I extract bits for online help in Emacs itself. Since the Emacs Info interface links into the docs, I wonder whether the combination is allowed under Emacs' license. > These > sections are consistent with freedom because practically speaking they > don't stop people from making the software do what they want it to do, > or the making the manual the manual teach what they want it to teach. Yes they do. You can't merge the docs into software and you can't make a reference card from the manual content. Peter