Adam Bolte <[email protected]> writes: > Given that the Debian project rejects the GNU Free Documentation > License from main - a stance which I strongly disagree with
I'm surprised by that. Both because that gets the facts wrong, and because you support the non-free FDL. The FDL is not a free license: it contains restrictions on modification and redistribution that violate the four freedoms. So any software work (using the full meaning of “software”, i.e. any digitally-encoded information) licensed under the FDL is not a free work. The name “Free Documentation License” is thereby a misnomer. The FSF's official position is that the four freedoms only apply to programs, despite the fact that this is dictating how a work will be used by the recipient and choosing what freedoms they deserve. But the way a software work is used doesn't change what freedoms the recipient deserves. A PDF is a program *and* a document; a font is a program *and* a data file; many programs contain documentation, and vice versa. Moreover, there's no justification for the copyright holder to dictate how any recipient will interpret the data stream, in order to deny some freedoms on that basis. The Debian project had a long debate on this in the first half of the previous decade. The resolution of the project in 2006-03 <URL:http://www.debian.org/News/2006/20060316> is that works are free under the FDL *only* if the license grant doesn't exercise the restrictions on modification. So there are many FDL-licensed works in Debian. I happen to disagree with the Debian project on this; I think there are other clauses (e.g. the restriction on distributing a work without a copy of the license, the restrictions nominally to prevent DRM-enabled distribution) that make any FDL-licensed work non-free. -- \ “There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily | `\ escaped the chronicler's mind.” —Douglas Adams | _o__) | Ben Finney _______________________________________________ Free-software-melb mailing list [email protected] http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb Free Software Melbourne home page: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/
