Thibaut VARENE wrote: > That's what I call favorizing the minority over the majority.
I acknowledge the context of this remark, but I ask you to remember the trouble that the other view can cause when generalised and majority takes all, regardless of minority. Compromise is only possible when the basic aims of two groups are not in conflict. On the GNU FDL, we seem to have an obvious conflict between requiring all distributors to include an unmodified GNU Manifesto (or similar document) in the built edition of the work and the Debian Free Software Guidelines about Source Code, Derived Works and Integrity of The Author's Source Code. There might be another conflict between the DRM provisions and various other DFSGs, and others I'm less clear about right now (I found one killer now, so I stopped looking so closely). It is not easy or fun for debian to change the DFSG and FSF may not wish to give up their power as copyright-holder to promote their manifesto. Is total compromise possible? For what it's worth, I disagree with the assertion that documentation cannot be software and will speak out against it. If we accept that source code can be software and text can be source code, then text can be software. We also know that documentation can be text. Therefore, documentation can be software. I've yet to see such a simple disproof in the other direction. Even without it, I would suggest that we should require documentation to follow the same guidelines as programs, because a lot of the motivations are the same. I sympathise with the view that there are a lot of side issues to this discussion. When we were expecting FSF to consult, it was good to try to enumerate as many of these as possible. It may be better to focus on the most obvious and agreeable killer reason now and build consensus around a statement about only that. -- MJR/slef http://people.debian.org/~mjr/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
