Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
On Saturday 19 April 2003 18:36, Manoj Srivastava wrote: On Thu, 17 Apr 2003 12:37:28 -0500, Branden Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: Not if people don't second my motion, or propose something similar. It may be that we're content to complain but lack the will to act. For what it is worth, as a memeber of the silent lurkers, I agree with and would second your proposal. As one of the even more silent lurkers I'd like to add my voice to that too. Actually I'm *very* glad that so many folks on d-l are actively working on/thinking about this issue, as I see the FSF heading into a very unfortunate direction with this invariant section stuff. Cheers, Yven -- Yven Johannes Leist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.leist.beldesign.de
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
Yven Johannes Leist wrote: On Saturday 19 April 2003 18:36, Manoj Srivastava wrote: On Thu, 17 Apr 2003 12:37:28 -0500, Branden Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: Not if people don't second my motion, or propose something similar. It may be that we're content to complain but lack the will to act. For what it is worth, as a memeber of the silent lurkers, I agree with and would second your proposal. As one of the even more silent lurkers I'd like to add my voice to that too. Actually I'm *very* glad that so many folks on d-l are actively working on/thinking about this issue, as I see the FSF heading into a very unfortunate direction with this invariant section stuff. Cheers, Yven On the page http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-gfdl.html; I found : The GFDL is meant as a way to enlist commercial publishers in funding free documentation without surrendering any vital liberty. The cover text feature, and certain other aspects of the license that deal with covers, title page, history, and endorsements, are included to make the license appealing to commercial publishers for books whose authors are paid. To improve the appeal, I consulted specifically with staff of publishing companies, as well as lawyers, free documentation writers, and the community at large, in writing the GFDL. Then, why don't have two license : the GFDL for commercial publishers; and a the community GFDL (without the problems of the actual GFDL) for free documentation writers and non commercial publishers. The writer, however, 'll be able to choose.
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
Yven Johannes Leist wrote: On Saturday 19 April 2003 18:36, Manoj Srivastava wrote: On Thu, 17 Apr 2003 12:37:28 -0500, Branden Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: Not if people don't second my motion, or propose something similar. It may be that we're content to complain but lack the will to act. For what it is worth, as a memeber of the silent lurkers, I agree with and would second your proposal. As one of the even more silent lurkers I'd like to add my voice to that too. Actually I'm *very* glad that so many folks on d-l are actively working on/thinking about this issue, as I see the FSF heading into a very unfortunate direction with this invariant section stuff. Cheers, Yven On the page http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-gfdl.html; I found : The GFDL is meant as a way to enlist commercial publishers in funding free documentation without surrendering any vital liberty. The cover text feature, and certain other aspects of the license that deal with covers, title page, history, and endorsements, are included to make the license appealing to commercial publishers for books whose authors are paid. To improve the appeal, I consulted specifically with staff of publishing companies, as well as lawyers, free documentation writers, and the community at large, in writing the GFDL. Then, why don't have two license : the GFDL for commercial publishers; and a community GFDL (without the problems of the actual GFDL) for free documentation writers and non commercial publishers. The writer, however, 'll be able to choose.
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
|| On Wed, 16 Apr 2003 09:27:43 -0400 || Peter S Galbraith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: psg No if it were released under the GPL. Compare to: psg I'm sorry, but if somebody wrote something into SOFTWARE that psg was important to him and you didn't like it and removed it to psg distribute that as a newer version of the SOFTWARE, you'd be psg violating that persons Copyright. psg Care to defend that again? Software and documentation are quite different according to the way they are treated by the legal system. Moral rights (on which this is based) are seen much more strongly for documentation. The scenario in question is normal daily business for documents, but so far nobody has tried it for software. Regards, Georg -- Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] Free Software Foundation Europe (http://fsfeurope.org) Brave GNU World(http://brave-gnu-world.org) pgphMdyB92ENQ.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
|| On Wed, 16 Apr 2003 09:06:51 -0400 || Peter S Galbraith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The GFDL deeks to do the same thing. Only this time you find yourself in the position of middleman and have to take care to not violate the rights of either party. psg Quite the opposite actually. Any redistributor can add psg invariant sections which makes sharing difficult. Yes. But that is a question of Copyright law, not license. Given that a document is under a license that permits modification, any redistributor could add anything and then say that removing it would hurt his or her moral rights. Any license trying to allow modification/removal of such sections would run a higher risk of being ruled invalid as a whole because these are inalienable rights. So by having no possibility for invariant sections in a documentation license, all you do is increase the possibility that it will one day be ruled to be invalid as a whole. Regards, Georg -- Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] Free Software Foundation Europe (http://fsfeurope.org) Brave GNU World(http://brave-gnu-world.org) pgpU5NGm6eH3p.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
|| On Thu, 17 Apr 2003 12:28:36 -0700 (PDT) || Mark Rafn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Are you referring to documentation under the GFDL? Why would that have to be removed? mr Not all GFDL documentation, only that which contains invariant mr sections which cannot be removed or modified. I see. I was just trying to understand the reasons as someone at some point indicated it was possibly illegal to ship GPL and GFDL licensed things together. If you say that you are planning to remove it because Debian thinks it is non-free, that is something else. Regards, Georg -- Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] Free Software Foundation Europe (http://fsfeurope.org) Brave GNU World(http://brave-gnu-world.org) pgpQIiUtrdKYY.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
|| On Thu, 17 Apr 2003 15:05:48 -0400 || [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Brian T. Sniffen) wrote: bts A reference card has a subset of commands, chosen for bts usefulness, elegance, or aesthetic appeal. It has succinct bts descriptions, which are a creative effort. It is definitely bts copyrightable on either of those points. Although you phrase it that way, you are in fact not contradicting any of what I wrote. One can certainly argue that the choice of subset as well as the way they are presented are Copyrightable. But then only those parts would be Copyrightable, not the references themselves. bts I'm not at all sure what to say to this. Are you talking about bts Berne Convention copyright law? Also, but not only. Berne is very loose and leaves a lot of room for the national initiatives. Also there is Stockholm. Then there are the national laws that need to be taken into account. Naturally, I'm more familiar with the European Copyright -- or Droit d'Auteur, rather -- systems, but since Europe is a very active region for Free Software, considering the European situation seems useful. bts Are you really asserting that the comments and strings in a bts source file labelled as being under the GPL might not be under bts the GPL? I wrote no such thing. It might be interesting to find the grey areas for that, but normally one would probably see the comments and strings as parts of the program rather than an independent document. Regards, Georg -- Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] Free Software Foundation Europe (http://fsfeurope.org) Brave GNU World(http://brave-gnu-world.org) pgpNL8viUW1Na.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
|| On Wed, 16 Apr 2003 11:34:17 +0100 || Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Although I have said it before, I'll say it again: I don't consider the GFDL to be perfect, but from the free documentation licenses I have seen so far, it seems to be the most solid one for the reasons I've described. ege What do you mean by a free documentation licence? A documentation license that will provide a good balance between the freedoms of the individual and the freedoms and needs of society in a way that it will maximize freedom for society while keeping that freedom legally defendable. ege Personally, I will stick to using the GPL, even for non-software. That is putting freedom at risk, however -- possibly even more than with a free documentation license that does not permit invariant sections -- as the license was clearly written for software, not documentation. So although you probably won't run into immediate problems with it, it does make the legal situation somewhat fuzzy for such documentation. Of course technical manuals require change. So it may be possible that authors use invariant sections in an unwise way, covering parts that need to be changed to keep the manual useful. In that case such manuals should maybe be put into contrib. ege So you agree that some documents licensed under the GFDL are not ege free. I thought contrib was for things under free licenses that are somehow suffering from limitations. But I may be wrong. Sometimes authors consider more things invariant than would be technically useful. Nobody can take that right away from an author under Droit d'Auteur, which we have to take into account for global projects. But of course it limits the usefulness of the documentation for the Debian project and its users. So I guess my suggestion would be the following policy: 1) The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) is a free documentation license; recommended for use in Debian without invariant sections. 2a) Documents without invariant sections go into main. 2b) Documents with invariant sections are to be reviewed by the Debian Documentation Project whether the invariant section makes the document technically unmaintainable. [An example for non-maintainable technical parts would be if the documentation of a web browser has the description of the key bindings in an invariant section.] If the invariant sections still allow maintaining the document technically, it can go into main. If the invariant sections do not allow technical maintenance, it goes into contrib as it might still be somewhat useful. That said, I think I've done what I could to explain the situation to the best of my knowledge and provide a viable solution. So I would like to put this to rest for now and suggest to maybe reexamine the situation in half a year, or so. Regards, Georg -- Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] Free Software Foundation Europe (http://fsfeurope.org) Brave GNU World(http://brave-gnu-world.org) pgpCtCPmNdz4x.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 11:30:17AM +0200, Georg C. F. Greve wrote: psg I don't want to ship the 5MB documentation with my 100KB GUI, psg just the few paragraphs that matter. That seems too genereralized to be useful. It seems hard to imagine a situation where an obviously very long and detailed piece of documentation -- 5MB is unusually large for plain text -- would not be useful as a whole. Or rather that including only a few paragraphs would be a useful activity. Do you have a concrete example? I find it hard to believe that you are serious here. If you really need a concrete example, fire up Emacs, hit C-h i, choose any large package from the menu, and tell me with a straight face that the introduction on its own could not be useful in another context (I picked bison). And if it is just a few paragraphs that need to be hard-coded into your application, why not write them yourself? Um, same could be asked of those few lines of code that you want to use from any piece of software. You really are seriously missing the point. If it is more than just a few paragraphs, is this a special situation where harddisk space is so limited that the whole documentation could not be reasonable placed somewhere in the system? This is just so far out it's almost funny. psg It's _very_ weird to have to convince a GNU representative of psg these issues. As the GNU Free Documentation License is the license that was written with a lot of thought going into balancing the rights of the author of a documentation and the rights of the users -- including, but not limited to, programmers -- I wouldn't find it surprising that GNU people will seek to explain the background. All that should be needed is that the author be assured by the license terms that readers will be given an accurate representation of the degree to which any and all contributors are responsible for the work that they are reading. If authors want more, I'd like to see a damn good reason why they deserve it, and so far none has been forthcoming. Cheers, Nick -- Nick Phillips -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Stay away from hurricanes for a while.
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
On Thu, Apr 17, 2003 at 03:05:48PM -0400, Brian T. Sniffen wrote: But the issue here is not copying or modifying an existing card, but deriving a reference card from the Emacs manual. If the documentation was licensed under the BSD license, wouldn't you still have to include the full license text on the card? If the GPL, a change list as well? If these are a problem as well, the argument against the GFDL here is less interesting; and if they're not, this GFDL argument probably isn't, either. There seem to be other, more convincing arguments against invariant sections. -- Glenn Maynard
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
On Sat, Apr 19, 2003 at 01:51:22PM +0200, Georg C. F. Greve wrote: Given that a document is under a license that permits modification, any redistributor could add anything and then say that removing it would hurt his or her moral rights. Any license trying to allow modification/removal of such sections would run a higher risk of being ruled invalid as a whole because these are inalienable rights. So by having no possibility for invariant sections in a documentation license, all you do is increase the possibility that it will one day be ruled to be invalid as a whole. If this is the reason for allowing invariant sections, it doesn't explain why GNU is actually using them in their own documentation. If this was the only reason--that it's ugly but needed--then the license should recommend against their use, and GNU should be setting an example by not using them at all. The fact that they are, in fact, being actively used indicates that they're driven by more than this legal requirement. There have been suggestions that GFDL-licensed text be considered free only if it doesn't actually contain any invariant sections. This would seem to accomodate the reason you're giving (the possibility is still there, even though Debian has no obligation to ditfibute the result)--but as GNU is actively *using* them, it would still result in GNU documentation being removed from Debian. -- Glenn Maynard
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
On Thu, 17 Apr 2003 12:37:28 -0500, Branden Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 09:10:00AM -0700, Mark Rafn wrote: Good luck with that, and I look forward to hearing from you and/or other FSF representatives soon. I hope it's not terribly much longer, as the current semi-consensus is likely to congeal into an actual necessity to remove un-free emacs documentation from Debian. Not if people don't second my motion, or propose something similar. It may be that we're content to complain but lack the will to act. For what it is worth, as a memeber of the silent lurkers, I agree with and would second your proposal. manoj pgpTLq5kGQFsa.pgp Description: PGP signature -- There is no doubt that my lawyer is honest. For example, when he filed his income tax return last year, he declared half of his salary as 'unearned income.' Michael Lara Manoj Srivastava [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/ 1024R/C7261095 print CB D9 F4 12 68 07 E4 05 CC 2D 27 12 1D F5 E8 6E 1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
On Wed, Apr 16, 2003 at 10:52:55AM +0200, Georg C. F. Greve wrote: The GFDL offers the users and distributors such as Debian a higher degree of legal security, however, as someone who has not used the possible measure of invariant section will have a much harder time suing for violation of his or her moral rights than someone using a license that didn't offer such measures. I find this argument unconvincing, for two reasons. First, Invariant sections don't actually accomplish this. Only Secondary Sections can be marked Invariant. Other sections, i.e. the meat of the document, cannot be so marked under the GFDL. Therefore, using the GFDL says nothing about the author's claims to moral rights on the majority of the document. Second, documentation is often just as functional as the programs it describes, and this goes both ways. Consider TeX, where the documentation and the code were created as a single work. Consider also how protective Donald Knuth has been of TeX's rendering algorithms. I don't see why the code-part-of-TeX should be treated under entirely different rules than the book-part-of-TeX, and I don't see how you could seriously claim that there are no aesthetic components to the way TeX lays out documents. I don't see this critical difference that makes Invariant Sections necessary for documentation but leaves the GPL just fine for code. Richard Braakman
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
Glenn Maynard [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On Thu, Apr 17, 2003 at 03:05:48PM -0400, Brian T. Sniffen wrote: But the issue here is not copying or modifying an existing card, but deriving a reference card from the Emacs manual. If the documentation was licensed under the BSD license, wouldn't you still have to include the full license text on the card? If the GPL, a change list as well? No. I could include them on another piece of paper with the card. Those licenses merely require text be included *with* the document. The GFDL mandates that invariant sections be part of the document, which is much worse. For example, if I want to create some art with Richard Stallman's photograph over a backdrop of text from the emacs manual, I have to include the GNU manifesto as *part of the picture*. It's not enough to include it alongside the picture, it has to be part of the same document. In contrast, the free GPL or free BSD license lets me just include a copyright statement for the text, and a copy of the license, with the picture. If these are a problem as well, the argument against the GFDL here is less interesting; and if they're not, this GFDL argument probably isn't, either. There seem to be other, more convincing arguments against invariant sections. For example, if I want to perform a dramatic reading of a page from the Emacs Manual in some horribly expensive format, I have to read a bunch of invariant sections with it. I agree that there are more convincing philosophical arguments to avoid invariant sections, and to consider invariant sections non-free. But this is an example of a category of practical problems introduced by invariant sections, something which can be presented to those who say this is merely a philosophical issue. -Brian
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 09:10:00AM -0700, Mark Rafn wrote: Good luck with that, and I look forward to hearing from you and/or other FSF representatives soon. I hope it's not terribly much longer, as the current semi-consensus is likely to congeal into an actual necessity to remove un-free emacs documentation from Debian. Not if people don't second my motion, or propose something similar. It may be that we're content to complain but lack the will to act. -- G. Branden Robinson|Build a fire for a man, and he'll Debian GNU/Linux |be warm for a day. Set a man on [EMAIL PROTECTED] |fire, and he'll be warm for the http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |rest of his life. - Terry Pratchett pgpyfzVFrRReL.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
|| On Tue, 15 Apr 2003 09:10:00 -0700 (PDT) || Mark Rafn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: mr Indeed. Ensuring that Debian remains free is the primary reason mr for this list's existence, and it can be an emotional topic. True. All of us are probably feeling strongly about freedom. The fact that Debian works so hard to do these questions justice is one of the reasons that I have been so supportive of Debian in the past. [...] right now I need to set up a Free Software project with the European Commission, for which April 24th is the deadline. mr Good luck with that, and I look forward to hearing from you mr and/or other FSF representatives soon. Thanks, lets hope this project comes through. If it does, I think we can also expect Debian to benefit from it. mr I hope it's not terribly much longer, as the current mr semi-consensus is likely to congeal into an actual necessity to mr remove un-free emacs documentation from Debian. Are you referring to documentation under the GFDL? Why would that have to be removed? Regards, Georg -- Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] Free Software Foundation Europe (http://fsfeurope.org) Brave GNU World(http://brave-gnu-world.org) pgp2fWKoMDTiF.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
|| On Tue, 15 Apr 2003 10:37:57 -0400 || [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Brian T. Sniffen) wrote: bts You've heard all this before, but I haven't seen you answer it. bts Why does the GFDL prohibit me from making an emacs reference bts card from the manual? Sure, I could make a one-sided card where bts the other side is the Manifesto, but that wastes half my space. That is most likely a special case. Technical tables are not Copyrightable per se. Their special formatting or composition might be, but generally the table itself is not. This will probably also apply to such reference cards, which is a table mapping key presses to functions of a program. So it should be perfectly fine if you took the content of that reference card and printed it as long as you took care to not include things like special formatting or logos. bts In addition, how does the FSF expect anybody other than itself bts to distribute a GPL'd emacs with a GFDL manual? As far as I can bts see, they cannot be distributed together. Why would that be? Documents and software are different domains by law. Just putting them together -- even if one links to the other -- does not constitute one assembled work. In fact it is probable that not even hard-linking them by compiling a document into a program would legally form one work. For a somewhat definitive answer to that we'd need to have a study performed; but it is the estimation of a lawyer specialized on Copyright that I have run this through. Regards, Georg -- Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] Free Software Foundation Europe (http://fsfeurope.org) Brave GNU World(http://brave-gnu-world.org) pgpJBxXfvMn8U.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: || On Tue, 15 Apr 2003 10:37:57 -0400 || [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Brian T. Sniffen) wrote: bts You've heard all this before, but I haven't seen you answer it. bts Why does the GFDL prohibit me from making an emacs reference bts card from the manual? Sure, I could make a one-sided card where bts the other side is the Manifesto, but that wastes half my space. That is most likely a special case. Technical tables are not Copyrightable per se. Their special formatting or composition might be, but generally the table itself is not. This will probably also apply to such reference cards, which is a table mapping key presses to functions of a program. So it should be perfectly fine if you took the content of that reference card and printed it as long as you took care to not include things like special formatting or logos. I suspected you were trolling before, and am now essentially convinced of it. But what the heck, I'll feed you: You're horribly confused about copyright law, reference cards, or both. A reference card has a subset of commands, chosen for usefulness, elegance, or aesthetic appeal. It has succinct descriptions, which are a creative effort. It is definitely copyrightable on either of those points. But the issue here is not copying or modifying an existing card, but deriving a reference card from the Emacs manual. bts In addition, how does the FSF expect anybody other than itself bts to distribute a GPL'd emacs with a GFDL manual? As far as I can bts see, they cannot be distributed together. Why would that be? Documents and software are different domains by law. Just putting them together -- even if one links to the other -- does not constitute one assembled work. In fact it is probable that not even hard-linking them by compiling a document into a program would legally form one work. For a somewhat definitive answer to that we'd need to have a study performed; but it is the estimation of a lawyer specialized on Copyright that I have run this through. I'm not at all sure what to say to this. Are you talking about Berne Convention copyright law? Are you really asserting that the comments and strings in a source file labelled as being under the GPL might not be under the GPL? -Brian -- Brian T. Sniffen[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.evenmere.org/~bts/
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
On Thu, 17 Apr 2003, Georg C. F. Greve wrote: mr I hope it's not terribly much longer, as the current mr semi-consensus is likely to congeal into an actual necessity to mr remove un-free emacs documentation from Debian. Are you referring to documentation under the GFDL? Why would that have to be removed? Not all GFDL documentation, only that which contains invariant sections which cannot be removed or modified. They'd have to be removed for the same reason than any component of Debian would have to be removed if it was discovered to be non-free. Debian does not contain non-free components. We do make available archives of useful-but-unfree software which could contain this documentation, but it wouldn't be part of Debian. I expect there will be more time for debate and discussion before the actual removal takes place. Branden's proposal for documenting and writing a FAQ seems like the proper next step. -- Mark Rafn[EMAIL PROTECTED]http://www.dagon.net/
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
On Wed, Apr 16, 2003 at 01:59:37PM -0400, Peter S Galbraith wrote: If the manifesto marked as invariant? I didn't know that! It doesn't seem to be in the visible info text, but the top of each of the info files has a GFDL blurb. I grepped for Invariant in my emacs-21 info files. The main manual lists The GNU Manifesto, Distribution and GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE as Invariant Sections. There are also some smaller manuals that list none. That's 930 lines of material, about 46 kB. Richard Braakman
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
|| On Tue, 15 Apr 2003 09:31:26 -0400 || Peter S Galbraith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: psg It doesn't perserve freedom at all. It grants any redistributor psg the right to add unremovable rants to the loss of the user's psg freedom. So you are afraid of somebody adding a part that you don't like and making it invariant? I'm sorry, but if somebody wrote something into a document that was important to him and you didn't like it and removed it to distribute that as a newer version of the document, you'd be violating that persons Copyright. GNU Free Documentation License or no. Of course that person writing something unpleasant into it might be violating the rights of the previous authors if they feel misrepresented. Again that has nothing to do with the GFDL. psg It's copied from http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#severities psg If that text were licensed with invariant sections, I'd have to psg include them in this one-page help screen. I agree that making that particular text with invariant sections would be extremely unpractical and make little sense. Nobody says you have to use invariant sections, though. And I certainly didn't say every document should contain invariant sections. However: If it was under GFDL without making use of invariant sections, you'd be safe to use it the way you described. Right now you'd probably have to treat it as potentially invariant as a whole to be on the entirely safe legal side. psg Oh, I'm sorry. I thought this content was under a free license. psg You now seem to be saying otherwise. The strings you attach to psg your content make it non-free. Don't misrepresent what I said. I haven't attached anything, I was asking a question. And yes. If somebody doesn't like the GPL and tells me: All I wanted were these few lines, why should I adhere to the GPL because of that? my answer is that they are perfectly welcome to reimplement them themselves if they don't like the license chosen by the author. In my understanding freedom is not I can do whatever I want to whatever I want. I know there is a fundamental disagreement about this question between the BSD and the GNU people, but you know which side I am on. psg There you go again. It's not about disk space. It's about psg freedom. Exactly. That is why I didn't accept the technical idea that it wasn't possible to ship the whole document with the GUI that wishes to display parts of it or the necessity to hard-code parts of the document into the program. psg Do you really represent the FSF? Yes. psg Do they know how you really feel about these issues? I would think so. Although I have said it before, I'll say it again: I don't consider the GFDL to be perfect, but from the free documentation licenses I have seen so far, it seems to be the most solid one for the reasons I've described. I agree that invariant sections can be quite difficult for technical documentation -- especially if used unwisely. The GFDL offers the users and distributors such as Debian a higher degree of legal security, however, as someone who has not used the possible measure of invariant section will have a much harder time suing for violation of his or her moral rights than someone using a license that didn't offer such measures. In my eyes the GFDL is clearly a free license. Of course technical manuals require change. So it may be possible that authors use invariant sections in an unwise way, covering parts that need to be changed to keep the manual useful. In that case such manuals should maybe be put into contrib. Regards, Georg -- Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] Free Software Foundation Europe (http://fsfeurope.org) Brave GNU World(http://brave-gnu-world.org) pgpbBYXvqmjQl.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I'm sorry, but if somebody wrote something into a document that was important to him and you didn't like it and removed it to distribute that as a newer version of the document, you'd be violating that persons Copyright. Err, what complete BS. So, to take a (hypothetical) real world example[1], you're telling me that if the upstream author of the GNU Privacy Handbook (under the GFDL with no invariant sections or other options) added a 10Mb rant about how cows were secret leaders of a world-wide cabal poised to take over the earth RSN, I couldn't remove it because I'd be violating his copyright? Pfft. What rubbish. Do you really not get that one of the fundamental freedoms (of the free software community) is the freedom to fork and/or make changes that the original author is against? It's not something to be used hastily or regularly, but it's a fundamental freedom never the less. Or are you just so caught up in trying to defend the GFDL that you'll say almost anything to further that cause? GNU Free Documentation License or no. Really... so why is this in the GFDL then? |The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other |written document free in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone |the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without ^ *** |modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily, |this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get |credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for |modifications made by others. psg Do you really represent the FSF? Yes. psg Do they know how you really feel about these issues? I would think so. Well, if that's true then it's a real shame because my opinion of the FSF has fallen to an all time low. In my eyes the GFDL is clearly a free license. It's reasonably clear to me that there's a good consensus on debian-legal that GFDL (using invariant sections at least) is not and you don't seem to be convincing anyone otherwise... -- James [1] Real world in the sense that I maintain the gnupg-doc package which contains the GPH. Hypothetical in the sense that the example's clearly OTT to prove a point.
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
On Wed, Apr 16, 2003 at 10:52:55AM +0200, Georg C. F. Greve wrote: I'm sorry, but if somebody wrote something into a document that was important to him and you didn't like it and removed it to distribute that as a newer version of the document, you'd be violating that persons Copyright. GNU Free Documentation License or no. Yes, that's how copyright works. You're not allowed to change things without permission. *Free* licenses give you that permission. The GNU Free Documentation License specifically *does not* give you that permission when invariant sections are involved. In particular, in the case of GPLed software, you _can_ take any small part of the program and reuse it without any significant encumberance. Sure, you might have to GPL your work, and sure, you might have to display a copyright notice when run interactively, but you can do it. For example, without violating copyright or hoping that some exception applies, I can't excerpt: ] GDB can do four main kinds of things (plus other things in support of ] these) to help you catch bugs in the act: ] ]* Start your program, specifying anything that might affect its ] behavior. ] ]* Make your program stop on specified conditions. ] ]* Examine what has happened, when your program has stopped. ] ]* Change things in your program, so you can experiment with ] correcting the effects of one bug and go on to learn about another. ] ]You can use GDB to debug programs written in C and C++. For more ] information, see *Note Supported languages: Support. For more ] information, see *Note C and C++: C. from the current GDB manual without also including the full, and completely irrelevant, Free Software Needs Free Documentation diatribe. Again that has nothing to do with the GFDL. To reiterate. Copyright allows you a very high degree of control over what modifications may be made to your work. Copyright licenses allow you to exercise that control. Free licenses, that is, licenses that match the DFSG which is how Debian defines free, allow you to make a wide range of modifications that don't necessarily preserve the original authors intent. However: If it was under GFDL without making use of invariant sections, you'd be safe to use it the way you described. Documents licensed under the GFDL that don't make use of invariant sections, or front/back-cover texts, or the other loopholes to allow non-free additions to the documentation, are DFSG-free. If somebody doesn't like the GPL and tells me: All I wanted were these few lines, why should I adhere to the GPL because of that? No. The generalisation is All I wanted was these few lines, why should I have to take this whole chunk of irrelevant garbage as well?, and the analogy is to licenses that say You can do whatever you want with this software -- distribute it, modify it, whatever, as long as it always meets standard Foo. Such licenses are non-free. In my eyes the GFDL is clearly a free license. Good for you. Of course technical manuals require change. So it may be possible that authors use invariant sections in an unwise way, covering parts that need to be changed to keep the manual useful. In that case such manuals should maybe be put into contrib. The only way a freely licensed document would go into contrib is if it were in a format that was only readable using non-free software. If a document is in itself not free, it goes in non-free. It sets a disappointing example that the Free Software Foundation does not trust free licenses (that allow modification by anyone in almost any way) to protect the intent and history of some of their most precious works, including the GPL itself and the GNU Manifesto. For comparison: * The Debian Constitution http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution is made available under the Open Publication License * The Debian Developers Reference and Debian Policy are made available under the GPL * The Debian Social Contract and Debian Free Software Guidelines http://www.debian.org/social_contract are made available under the OPL and Other organizations may derive from and build on this document. Please give credit to the Debian project if you do. Derived works include the Open Source Definition, the Open Directory Project Social Contract, the Gentoo Linux Social Contract, presumably the MusicBrainz Social Contract, and possibly the Free University Project Social Contract. It's hard to see, from here, how allowing people to derive from your core documents is a bad thing -- even when you're focussed on letting people derive from the software you produce. Anyway, to answer your original question, GFDL = non-free is not an official Debian position simply because we haven't written up a proper explanation of why, and haven't gone through the GFDL documents in main to see which ones need removing. Cheers, aj --
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Although I have said it before, I'll say it again: I don't consider the GFDL to be perfect, but from the free documentation licenses I have seen so far, it seems to be the most solid one for the reasons I've described. What do you mean by a free documentation licence? Of course technical manuals require change. So it may be possible that authors use invariant sections in an unwise way, covering parts that need to be changed to keep the manual useful. In that case such manuals should maybe be put into contrib. So you agree that some documents licensed under the GFDL are not free. I think people are unhappy about the FSF publishing a licence with Free in its title, which does not however guarantee that stuff licensed under it is free; GFDL documentaton is only free if the GFDL is applied wisely. I'm glad the GPL doesn't have this feature. Personally, I will stick to using the GPL, even for non-software. Other people seem to have had the same idea. For example, here is an on-line Esperanto dictionary licensed under the GPL: http://www.uni-leipzig.de/esperanto/voko/revo/ Edmund
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Especially the GPL is striking a new balance between the rights of the author and the freedoms of the users that puts both above the wishes of middlemen. The GFDL deeks to do the same thing. Only this time you find yourself in the position of middleman and have to take care to not violate the rights of either party. Quite the opposite actually. Any redistributor can add invariant sections which makes sharing difficult. When you release code under the GPL, you're sure that contributors must distribute their work under the same license. So if they did interesting work in the derived work you can merge it back into the original as long as you add their name to the Copyright. Now you release the documentation under the GFDL without any invariant sections. A contributor releases an extended version of the docs but includes a long rant as an invariant section. You can't merge the work back in without including the long rant verbatim. This doesn't protect the original author nor the end users very well. -- Peter S. Galbraith, Debian Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://people.debian.org/~psg GPG key 1024/D2A913A1 - 97CE 866F F579 96EE 6E68 8170 35FF 799E
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: || On Tue, 15 Apr 2003 09:31:26 -0400 || Peter S Galbraith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: psg It doesn't perserve freedom at all. It grants any redistributor psg the right to add unremovable rants to the loss of the user's psg freedom. So you are afraid of somebody adding a part that you don't like and making it invariant? Absolutely. See my previous reply. Releasing software under the GPL assures me that I can merge in derived works from other contributors back into my original work. Using the GFDL means I might not be able to do that without being forced to add useless crap along with it. The GPL protects the original author and the end user from the abuses of redistributors; the GFDL allows these abuses. I'm sorry, but if somebody wrote something into a document that was important to him and you didn't like it and removed it to distribute that as a newer version of the document, you'd be violating that persons Copyright. GNU Free Documentation License or no. No if it were released under the GPL. Compare to: I'm sorry, but if somebody wrote something into SOFTWARE that was important to him and you didn't like it and removed it to distribute that as a newer version of the SOFTWARE, you'd be violating that persons Copyright. Care to defend that again? psg There you go again. It's not about disk space. It's about psg freedom. Exactly. That is why I didn't accept the technical idea that it wasn't possible to ship the whole document with the GUI that wishes to display parts of it or the necessity to hard-code parts of the document into the program. Imposing technical limitations is non-free. psg Do you really represent the FSF? Yes. psg Do they know how you really feel about these issues? I would think so. Well, I'm sorry to say I no longer feel that freedom is safe in the hands of the FSF. I will rethink future copyright assignments to the FSF. -- Peter S. Galbraith, Debian Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://people.debian.org/~psg GPG key 1024/D2A913A1 - 97CE 866F F579 96EE 6E68 8170 35FF 799E
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
[I've found this unsent message which I wrote yesterday] Brian T. Sniffen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You've heard all this before, but I haven't seen you answer it. Why does the GFDL prohibit me from making an emacs reference card from the manual? Sure, I could make a one-sided card where the other side is the Manifesto, but that wastes half my space. If the manifesto marked as invariant? I didn't know that! I don't have the texinfo sources here, only the Info version. There's a node: * GNU Free Documentation License:: The license for this documentation. It spells out how to use the license but doesn't apply it for this document. e.g. I can't find the copyright declaration for that document where the invariant sections are to be listed. In addition, how does the FSF expect anybody other than itself to distribute a GPL'd emacs with a GFDL manual? As far as I can see, they cannot be distributed together. Emacs links against the manual files, interpreting them programmatically -- this is how it takes me straight to the info page referring to particular variables or functions. It is, after all, a self-documenting editor. But the GFDL imposes additional requirements over the GPL, so they may not be distributed linked. It sounds to me that Debian should request that the FSF grant the exception to distribute the two works linked like that. Following the FSF's licenses to the letter would mean the removal of the manual from the emacs package, which isn't good for our users. Peter
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 10:37:57AM -0400, Brian T. Sniffen wrote: In addition, how does the FSF expect anybody other than itself to distribute a GPL'd emacs with a GFDL manual? Heh; maybe they don't. Maybe they're tired of all these Linux distributions that should be calling themselves GNU/Linux distributions, and only people who play ball should be allowed to easily access the documentation for GNU Emacs. Everyone else can just go use XEmacs or Vim, or some other editor that is looked down upon. :) -- G. Branden Robinson| No math genius, eh? Then perhaps Debian GNU/Linux | you could explain to me where you [EMAIL PROTECTED] | got these... PENROSE TILES! http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Stephen R. Notley pgpEcoQuLiyVv.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
|| On Mon, 14 Apr 2003 12:29:52 -0400 || Peter S Galbraith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: psg My example is _not_ a GUI to text (e.g. like xpdf) but a GUI to psg software. I'm more interested in hardcoding docs into software, psg producing a derived work composed of both works. I see. It wasn't entirely clear to me what you were referring to. The difference between hardcoding (compiling in) a document and displaying it from a separate file is purely technical. So we are truly talking about whether a certain technique should be allowed under all circumstances. That was also discussed about the GPL. Many people were complaining that it wasn't free because they couldn't take parts of GPL'ed software and compile them into their proprietary software any way they liked. Especially the GPL is striking a new balance between the rights of the author and the freedoms of the users that puts both above the wishes of middlemen. The GFDL deeks to do the same thing. Only this time you find yourself in the position of middleman and have to take care to not violate the rights of either party. I am sorry you are unhappy about having to use a different technical implementation than you would have liked to use. As much as I feel with you, I personally think the freedom this preserves is more important, though. That would make the relevant information immediately accessible without requiring to hide or remove any part of the document. psg I don't want to ship the 5MB documentation with my 100KB GUI, psg just the few paragraphs that matter. That seems too genereralized to be useful. It seems hard to imagine a situation where an obviously very long and detailed piece of documentation -- 5MB is unusually large for plain text -- would not be useful as a whole. Or rather that including only a few paragraphs would be a useful activity. Do you have a concrete example? And if it is just a few paragraphs that need to be hard-coded into your application, why not write them yourself? If it is more than just a few paragraphs, is this a special situation where harddisk space is so limited that the whole documentation could not be reasonable placed somewhere in the system? If so: the GUI itself would surely be much larger than the few paragraphs you seek to include. If harddisk space is so limited, it might be more useful to use some standard text display facility and include more of the documentation instead. psg It's _very_ weird to have to convince a GNU representative of psg these issues. As the GNU Free Documentation License is the license that was written with a lot of thought going into balancing the rights of the author of a documentation and the rights of the users -- including, but not limited to, programmers -- I wouldn't find it surprising that GNU people will seek to explain the background. Regards, Georg -- Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] Free Software Foundation Europe (http://fsfeurope.org) Brave GNU World(http://brave-gnu-world.org) pgp6siHPvllRq.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
|| On Mon, 14 Apr 2003 14:15:25 -0400 || Peter S Galbraith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: psg So you want us to pretend that the work these Artists do is free psg because writing is so much more artistic than coding? No. And unlike most works of art -- for which aesthetics or philosophical advancement is the use -- software derives its usefulness almost exclusively from its function. psg I guess that makes us code writers much lower in the hierarchy. No. It is not a question of hierarchy. Different does not necessarily mean better or worse, it can be neutral. And in this case I think it is. Writing good programs is a very unique skill that not everybody has. It is very important if mankind truly wants to enter the information society. So is writing good documents. The one statement that I made about the relationship of the two is that the two aren't identical. Being a friend of differentiated thinking, I think that warrants giving it some thought as to where and how they differ and what that means to us. Unfortunately it seems that because of the history -- of which I was not a part, by the way -- the issue is still very emotional to most people on this list. Also it is possible that my skills of explaining are not up to the task. In fact I never meant to start this discussion this way and at the current time. On the LinuxTag 2003 speaker list there was a Debian person stating that Debian was officially considering the GFDL to be non-free. As I had been told this was still more or less in discussion and not yet the official position, I inquired about it. From the middle of that discussion someone took one of my statements and cross-posted it here without first contacting me about it. So although I would have preferred to not touch upon this topic right now in this way, I felt I should at least try to explain some of the background for this. Unfortunately, I am too busy to do this discussion justice, as important as it may be. Because right now I need to set up a Free Software project with the European Commission, for which April 24th is the deadline. I am sorry, but getting that finished/to succeed seems to be the most useful endeavour for me to spend my time on, so please understand that I won't really take the time to participate in this discussion any longer. Regards, Georg -- Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] Free Software Foundation Europe (http://fsfeurope.org) Brave GNU World(http://brave-gnu-world.org) pgpkMk5dQrPSu.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
|| On Tue, 15 Apr 2003 11:30:17 +0200 || Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: gg That was also discussed about the GPL. gg Many people were complaining that it wasn't free because they gg couldn't take parts of GPL'ed software and compile them into gg their proprietary software any way they liked. I just realized that it was probably not wise to use proprietary software in that example as people might get more upset about it. In case anyone felt personally insulted: I apologize, this was not my intention. So please allow me to change that paragraph to Many people were complaining that it wasn't free because they couldn't take random parts of GPL'ed software and compile them into their Free Software without taking the GPL into account. As legal proceedings are the same and this will hopefully increase my chances of being understood correctly. Regards, Georg -- Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] Free Software Foundation Europe (http://fsfeurope.org) Brave GNU World(http://brave-gnu-world.org) pgpVG1oy8ElIf.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: || On Tue, 15 Apr 2003 11:30:17 +0200 || Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: gg That was also discussed about the GPL. gg Many people were complaining that it wasn't free because they gg couldn't take parts of GPL'ed software and compile them into gg their proprietary software any way they liked. I just realized that it was probably not wise to use proprietary software in that example as people might get more upset about it. In case anyone felt personally insulted: I apologize, this was not my intention. So please allow me to change that paragraph to Many people were complaining that it wasn't free because they couldn't take random parts of GPL'ed software and compile them into their Free Software without taking the GPL into account. As legal proceedings are the same and this will hopefully increase my chances of being understood correctly. I disregarded your comment the first time because it wasn't productive. But what you are in effect trying to accomplish (whether or not it's done on purpose) is to paint yourself as the _free_ representative. A bystander reading the above would agree with you and perhaps assume that we don't. In fact, we're saying that the invariants parts aren't free for the basically the same reason the advertising clause of the old BSD was bad. Except that the invariant sections are much worse, since they apply to actual content and not simply source acknowledgement. Peter
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: || On Mon, 14 Apr 2003 12:29:52 -0400 || Peter S Galbraith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: psg My example is _not_ a GUI to text (e.g. like xpdf) but a GUI to psg software. I'm more interested in hardcoding docs into software, psg producing a derived work composed of both works. I see. It wasn't entirely clear to me what you were referring to. The difference between hardcoding (compiling in) a document and displaying it from a separate file is purely technical. So we are truly talking about whether a certain technique should be allowed under all circumstances. It's not a technique. It's whether I'm allowed to copy a portion of the text (acknowledging the source) without the invariant sections. The technique doesn't matter. Especially the GPL is striking a new balance between the rights of the author and the freedoms of the users that puts both above the wishes of middlemen. The GFDL deeks to do the same thing. Only this time you find yourself in the position of middleman and have to take care to not violate the rights of either party. FUD. I am sorry you are unhappy about having to use a different technical implementation than you would have liked to use. As much as I feel with you, I personally think the freedom this preserves is more important, though. It doesn't perserve freedom at all. It grants any redistributor the right to add unremovable rants to the loss of the user's freedom. That would make the relevant information immediately accessible without requiring to hide or remove any part of the document. psg I don't want to ship the 5MB documentation with my 100KB GUI, psg just the few paragraphs that matter. That seems too genereralized to be useful. It seems hard to imagine a situation where an obviously very long and detailed piece of documentation -- 5MB is unusually large for plain text -- would not be useful as a whole. Or rather that including only a few paragraphs would be a useful activity. Do you have a concrete example? Sure. Suppose I wanted to copy the definition of an Emacs function from its texinfo file? Or, a very concrete example: I'm the author of http://people.debian.org/~psg/debian-bug.el It's an Emacs interface to the Debian bug tracking system. It in, there's a pull-down menu entry that causes the display of bug severity definitions that users that read in order to file proper bug reports. It's copied from http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#severities If that text were licensed with invariant sections, I'd have to include them in this one-page help screen. And if it is just a few paragraphs that need to be hard-coded into your application, why not write them yourself? If it's just a few paragraphs that you need from this software library, why don't you just re-write them from scrach? Oh, I'm sorry. I thought this content was under a free license. You now seem to be saying otherwise. The strings you attach to your content make it non-free. If it is more than just a few paragraphs, is this a special situation where harddisk space is so limited that the whole documentation could not be reasonable placed somewhere in the system? There you go again. It's not about disk space. It's about freedom. Do you really represent the FSF? Do they know how you really feel about these issues? I'm very surprised that you are defending this position. If so: the GUI itself would surely be much larger than the few paragraphs you seek to include. If harddisk space is so limited, it might be more useful to use some standard text display facility and include more of the documentation instead. I give up. psg It's _very_ weird to have to convince a GNU representative of psg these issues. As the GNU Free Documentation License is the license that was written with a lot of thought going into balancing the rights of the author of a documentation and the rights of the users -- including, but not limited to, programmers -- I wouldn't find it surprising that GNU people will seek to explain the background. Regards, Georg -- Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] Free Software Foundation Europe(http://fsfeurope.org) Brave GNU World (http://brave-gnu-world.org) -- Peter S. Galbraith, Debian Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://people.debian.org/~psg GPG key 1024/D2A913A1 - 97CE 866F F579 96EE 6E68 8170 35FF 799E
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: gg That was also discussed about the GPL. gg Many people were complaining that it wasn't free because they gg couldn't take parts of GPL'ed software and compile them into gg their proprietary software any way they liked. I just realized that it was probably not wise to use proprietary software in that example as people might get more upset about it. In case anyone felt personally insulted: I apologize, this was not my intention. So please allow me to change that paragraph to Many people were complaining that it wasn't free because they couldn't take random parts of GPL'ed software and compile them into their Free Software without taking the GPL into account. As legal proceedings are the same and this will hopefully increase my chances of being understood correctly. You've heard all this before, but I haven't seen you answer it. Why does the GFDL prohibit me from making an emacs reference card from the manual? Sure, I could make a one-sided card where the other side is the Manifesto, but that wastes half my space. There's an easy and wrong counterargument that I'd have to include the license, but I can put that on cheap onion paper; the Manifesto has to be included as part of the document, so it's got to go on the same expensive coffee-proof laminated stock as the reference card. In addition, how does the FSF expect anybody other than itself to distribute a GPL'd emacs with a GFDL manual? As far as I can see, they cannot be distributed together. Emacs links against the manual files, interpreting them programmatically -- this is how it takes me straight to the info page referring to particular variables or functions. It is, after all, a self-documenting editor. But the GFDL imposes additional requirements over the GPL, so they may not be distributed linked. -Brian -- Brian T. Sniffen[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.evenmere.org/~bts/
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
On Tue, 15 Apr 2003, Georg C. F. Greve wrote: Unfortunately it seems that because of the history -- of which I was not a part, by the way -- the issue is still very emotional to most people on this list. Indeed. Ensuring that Debian remains free is the primary reason for this list's existence, and it can be an emotional topic. Still, the Debian responses have been both reasoned and polite. You can expect this when the topic comes up again. Unfortunately, I am too busy to do this discussion justice, as important as it may be. Because right now I need to set up a Free Software project with the European Commission, for which April 24th is the deadline. Good luck with that, and I look forward to hearing from you and/or other FSF representatives soon. I hope it's not terribly much longer, as the current semi-consensus is likely to congeal into an actual necessity to remove un-free emacs documentation from Debian. -- Mark Rafn[EMAIL PROTECTED]http://www.dagon.net/
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: || Branden Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: br Your analysis ignores the fact that the GNU FDL does not permit br Invariant Sections to be omitted entirely from the work when it br is redistributed. If the GNU FDL did that, it would take a giant br step towards DFSG-freeness. B. Or do you mean it doesn't allow cutting out sections that the author previously defined as important and invariant? Interpretation B -- which you probably meant -- is already included in the analysis, as cutting out parts is also modification. If I write a GUI front-end for some software which has documentation under this license, can I take a few paragraphs of the documentation to use under my help menu without including invariant sections? If not, then that's very onerous. I might need to include 2 pages of unrelated stuff to get my help menu text. Oh wait, my GUI front-end is GNU Emacs, which is GPL'ed. This license is not GPL-compatible so I can't merge the documentation, can I? Peter
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
|| On Mon, 14 Apr 2003 10:12:53 -0400 || Peter S Galbraith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Interpretation B -- which you probably meant -- is already included in the analysis, as cutting out parts is also modification. psg If I write a GUI front-end for some software which has psg documentation under this license, can I take a few paragraphs of psg the documentation to use under my help menu without including psg invariant sections? This is mixing two independent questions -- that of writing a GUI to display text (software, potentially under GPL) and that of which text (documentation, potentially under GFDL) you display in which way. If we ignore potential DMCA/EUCD/SW-patent issues, which are unrelated to the issue at hand, it is always okay to write a GUI that can display documents regardless of their license. If this GUI would deliberately detect GFDL'ed documents and hide information from the user, it might be made to violate the license of the documentation -- I'd have to think about this some more to come to a final conclusion -- but generally, this seems an issue of the user of the software, not the author. In the special case that you seem to be referring to, which is as author of a specialized help GUI, you could of course jump to the relevant paragraphs/parts of the documentation directly. That would make the relevant information immediately accessible without requiring to hide or remove any part of the document. Hiding or even removing parts of the documentation doesn't seem necessary for that and in general does not seem like a useful job for the author of a GUI. The decision of what a user wants to read should be made by the user, not by the author of his or her software. Regards, Georg Greve -- Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] Free Software Foundation Europe (http://fsfeurope.org) Brave GNU World(http://brave-gnu-world.org) pgprUmAeNkEoc.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: || On Mon, 14 Apr 2003 10:12:53 -0400 || Peter S Galbraith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Interpretation B -- which you probably meant -- is already included in the analysis, as cutting out parts is also modification. psg If I write a GUI front-end for some software which has psg documentation under this license, can I take a few paragraphs of psg the documentation to use under my help menu without including psg invariant sections? This is mixing two independent questions -- that of writing a GUI to display text (software, potentially under GPL) and that of which text (documentation, potentially under GFDL) you display in which way. Don't put into my mouth. My example is _not_ a GUI to text (e.g. like xpdf) but a GUI to software. I'm more interested in hardcoding docs into software, producing a derived work composed of both works. If we ignore potential DMCA/EUCD/SW-patent issues, which are unrelated to the issue at hand, it is always okay to write a GUI that can display documents regardless of their license. I'm not interested in displaying text available separately on the system, but rather in having my GUI display hardcoded relevant bits of documentation (as a quick reference for example, or as quick start primer). If this GUI would deliberately detect GFDL'ed documents and hide information from the user, it might be made to violate the license of the documentation -- I'd have to think about this some more to come to a final conclusion -- but generally, this seems an issue of the user of the software, not the author. This is not a xpdf-like documentation browser, so I'll refrain from replying to this. In the special case that you seem to be referring to, which is as author of a specialized help GUI, you could of course jump to the relevant paragraphs/parts of the documentation directly. That would make the relevant information immediately accessible without requiring to hide or remove any part of the document. I don't want to ship the 5MB documentation with my 100KB GUI, just the few paragraphs that matter. Hiding or even removing parts of the documentation doesn't seem necessary for that and in general does not seem like a useful job for the author of a GUI. The decision of what a user wants to read should be made by the user, not by the author of his or her software. The decision of what documentation in embed in a GUI should be made by the GUI author, not by the author of the document that information is copied from. This is where we differ. I think you have addressed and confirmed my concern very well: - Documents under the FDL with invariant sections cannot be merged into the software they are supposed to document. The FDL prohibits it. The only way I could it would be to include the text and I don't want, but I can't anyway because the software license (GPL in this example) prohibits me from adding these restrictions on derived works. That is reason enough for me to avoid this license. I also think the restrictions are onerous enough to make it non-free, and not simply free but GPL-incompatible. It's _very_ weird to have to convince a GNU representative of these issues. Peter
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
On Mon, 2003-04-14 at 10:00, Georg C. F. Greve wrote: || On Mon, 14 Apr 2003 10:12:53 -0400 || Peter S Galbraith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: psg If I write a GUI front-end for some software which has psg documentation under this license, can I take a few paragraphs of psg the documentation to use under my help menu without including psg invariant sections? This is mixing two independent questions -- that of writing a GUI to display text (software, potentially under GPL) and that of which text (documentation, potentially under GFDL) you display in which way. No, it isn't. Sometimes we want to embed a fully abstracted document viewer into our code for the purpose of browsing documents, and sometimes we just want to display a tooltip, or a blurb in a label, or something. The question relates to the latter practice, not the former. I would consider it to be very non-free to require (legally, I mean) that all displays of text on a GUI be done through a formal renderer that ensures the integrity of the text viewed, just as I would consider it very non-free to require that a text-mode program use gets() and not printf() because printf() can change the content before printing it. Which brings us back to the question: must a tooltip quoting a GFDL document include the invariant sections, according to the license? Hiding or even removing parts of the documentation doesn't seem necessary for that and in general does not seem like a useful job for the author of a GUI. Symbolics didn't think it was useful or necessary to let RMS fix that printer driver way back when, either. The moment you write technical details into licenses is the moment you stray into non-free waters. The decision of what a user wants to read should be made by the user, not by the author of his or her software. With free software and free documentation, there's no need to limit either's choice. If the user doesn't like the author's choice of words or quoting habits, the user is free to change them. -- Jeff Licquia [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
Georg C. F. Greve [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But unlike prose, most software derives its justification to exist From its function, not its aesthetics. So let's not encourage the use of this license for software manuals. It's not an essay, it's a manual. The very same people who have been lumping together totally different areas of law such as copyright, patents and trademarks under the intellectual property rights terminology are still careful enough to differentiate between software and what they call content. That is because there is a significant difference between software and music, documents, prose or other things usually referred to as content by these people: If I have a single word processor that I like, I usually have all the word processors that I need, only very few people will use more than one. If I have one piece of prose that I like, I usually do not have all the prose I need/want. The same goes for documentation or music. In fact hearing some piece of music usually motivates me to get more. So you want us to pretend that the work these Artists do is free because writing is so much more artistic than coding? I'm judging the impact of the license here, not the content it licenses. So the patterns of distribution of software are mutually exclusive, whereas the distribution patterns of works of art are mutually supportive. And unlike most works of art -- for which aesthetics or philosophical advancement is the use -- software derives its usefulness almost exclusively from its function. I guess that makes us code writers much lower in the hierarchy. Peter
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, Georg C. F. Greve wrote: If we ignore potential DMCA/EUCD/SW-patent issues, which are unrelated to the issue at hand, it is always okay to write a GUI that can display documents regardless of their license. Sure, but it's clearly NOT ok to use some derived works of some GFDL-licensed documents as a part of that program. The problem has nothing to do with document viewers. It's that the distinction between documentation and software is fuzzy at best. In order for a work to be free, I must be able to include parts of it (meaning compile into) free software. In the special case that you seem to be referring to, which is as author of a specialized help GUI, you could of course jump to the relevant paragraphs/parts of the documentation directly. He's not talking about a specialized help gui. He's talking about a program which displays compiled-in text as part of it's help framework. To be more specific, it currently seems illegal for me to distribute the hypothetical software femto-emacs which runs on severely limited hardware and includes some snippets from the emacs manual. The decision of what a user wants to read should be made by the user, not by the author of his or her software. That's way too simplistic. Like software, decisions are made by the author, the derived-work authors, and the distributors. The user gets to pick from available choices (unless she is also a derived-work author). Free software very clearly recognizes this. ONLY by giving derived-work authors and distributors free reign over the functionality/content of the work will users actually get any choice in what to run/read. I don't see that free documentation, free media, or free art is any different. Reserving the right to make arbitrary modifications makes it non-free. -- Mark Rafn[EMAIL PROTECTED]http://www.dagon.net/
Re: query from Georg Greve of GNU about Debian's opinion of the F DL
Georg C. F. Greve wrote: If I have one piece of prose that I like, I usually do not have all the prose I need/want. The same goes for documentation or music. In fact hearing some piece of music usually motivates me to get more. Huh? Invariant sections never give you more documentation. The GFDL says contains nothing that could fall directly within that overall subject. The text of the GNU Manifesto doesn't help you satisfy your need for more documentation. So the patterns of distribution of software are mutually exclusive, whereas the distribution patterns of works of art are mutually supportive. And unlike most works of art -- for which aesthetics or philosophical advancement is the use -- software derives its usefulness almost exclusively from its function. Are you really saying that the primary use of documentation is aesthetics or philosophical advancement? Remember, it's the GNU Free Documentation License we're talking about, not the GNU Free Novel License. The GNU Manifesto doesn't further the purpose of the GNU Emacs manual--to tell me how to use Emacs--at all. Due to the above quoted text, no invariant section can ever further the fundamental purpose of documention: to document. All I see is the BSD advertising clause again: it furthers the cause of the original author (putting the programmer's name in print, or getting GNU's philosophy in print), and has practical problems. Furthering the cause of the original author is bearable, but the practical problems are not. -- Glenn Maynard
