2008/8/25 Rodney Sparapani <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Well, I think Debian's stance is a little silly.
I agree with you that Debian is a bit silly on this issue, but then again, so is the FSF or whoever is supporting the GFDL, since invariant sections are a bit worse than the advertising clause in the original BSD license and pose the same practical problems, plus it's GPL-incompatible, and lots of other issues arise due to the GFDL (e.g. it's impossible to move GFDLed software into free software because of the invariant sections; they're not even removable, and making an Emacs reference card from the Emacs manual is a copyright violation in most countries where Fair Use doesn't exist within the local copyright law). Debian is still the largest binary distribution of GNU/Linux and their opinion carries some weight. Consider all the Debian-derived distributions, for example. > And, frankly, a Debian package for GSL is a little silly too. What's more environmentally silly, in a very real sense, is to waste unnecessary CPU cycles compiling software that one central server can compile instead for all the users. That, plus having the convenience of a package manager centrally tracking the software and uninstalling it cleanly when desired (and no, "make uninstall" is not a convenient substitute, maybe checkinstall, but still not as convenient as apt). > $0.02, take it or leave it No offense, but I'll actually leave it, since all that matters is the opinion of the copyright holders. As a practical matter for Debian users, regardless all the opinions and what the Debian votes say, the best thing that could happen is if the GSL docs would not mark any section as invariant. - Jordi G. H. _______________________________________________ Help-gsl mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-gsl
