On Mon, Aug 10, 1998 at 12:13:01AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > Hi, > >>"Marcus" == Marcus Brinkmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Marcus> On Sun, Aug 09, 1998 at 05:28:45PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > >> No, I'm not. What I am saying is that I can see authors not > >> wanting their baby to be modified and distorted, and releasing > >> standards under no-modification-or-translation terms, and I do not > >> see this as a threat to the community, indeed, it is not even > >> detrimental. > > Marcus> It is okay for authors to think and act this way, but I don't > Marcus> think we can distribute technical documents with this > Marcus> restrict copyright in main. > > Reasons, please.
Because that does hurt the non-english-speaking free-software community. Good software needs good documentation, but to a non-english speaker a manual written in english is like no manual at all. If its author doesn't allow translations, someone else has to write a new manual from scratch. If everybody choose the "no-translation" terms that means the community needs different manuals for english, french, german, spanish, italian, japanese, chinese, ... > This is borderline. However, the resistance to translation > could be that some things do not translate well (peotry is one). For > some works of art, translation is artistic butchery. I can see why > people may not want that to happen. Let's talk about technical documents then. I don't care much about the immutability of a novel or a poetry work. > How about an original Graphic Novel? How about James Joyces > "Ullyses"? Do you approve af people punctuating Joyce's books? I remember seeing a few 'annotated "Ulisses"' books last time I went to the English Literature section of the university library. I guess that's common practice. But again, I think we should be focusing in technical documents. -- Enrique Zanardi [EMAIL PROTECTED]
