Fedor Zuev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > But if you take Acrobat, remove, say, the Adobe EULA, and > distribute the rest, it will be censorship or, at least, very > similar. Because you conceal from users the information from > creator, that they reasonable expect to receive from you. Against > the will both the user and creator.
First, let's be honest here. The number of users who will be annoyed by the wasted disk space probably outnumber the number of users who want the GNU manifesto attached to every GNU manual. It is in the nature of users to be pragmatic. The number of users who really want to see the Adobe EULA is much lower. Furthermore, the Adobe EULA, being a license document, is moot. Taken to the extreme, a program which happens to search through your files for porn and emails it back to the upstream is performance art, and therefore should not be touched. More classic free speech would be a program that pops up a box if you run it on a non-free system and reads to you the GNU manifesto before letting you do anything. Would we tolerate that as free software? I sure wouldn't. If an author wants to tack his lecture onto his free manual for free software, I expect the same rights, to delete the annoying and space-wasting parts. More importantly, what happens when Joe Bob's pop-mail 0.1 becomes ESR's fetchmail 179.3? Free software means that can happen; but your definition won't let that happen for free documentation, because Joe Bob hated guns and put a thirty page manifesto to that effect in his 'free' documentation, making it unusable for ESR's fetchmail. I guess ESR could toss in a thirty page manifest about how guns are good, but I'd rather not see a flame war in my manual. That is the nature of free software and free documentation, to put Debian under our control, to let things go beyond one solitary point of control and one opinion. > It may, also, be copyright infringement, of course. That's why we're having this argument, because we can't go around breaking licenses. Duh. ______________________________________________________________________ Do you want a free e-mail for life ? Get it at http://www.email.ro/
