I'm basically a debian newbie (I'm not a debian developer or anything) and (up to now) I've lurked on debian-legal because I find it interesting (yeah, I'm weird).
Through all the talk of interpretive guidelines for the DFSG, etc, I've been surprised at how little discussion has been given to the question of whether or not the GFDL is, in fact, DFSG free. There seem to be two, maybe three, schools of thought: 1) The freeness of the GFDL isn't terribly relevant. The DFSG is about software, and however you draw the line between software & other stuff, the stuff we're talking about here clearly isn't software. So we don't really *care* whether it's free, whatever free might mean for non-software data. Some people have floated the idea that we should come up with other guidelines for data, others reject this approach. I have to admit I don't fully understand this perspective, so I may be misrepresenting it. 2) Sure, we care about whether or not docs are free (not just distributable), but there's room for a fair amount of flexibility here. Some data can be non-modifiable, and that doesn't make in non-DFSG free. And so the GFDL is potentially subject to abuse, but if used _properly_ it's ok. The question is how do we decide when the use is proper? 3) Yes, docs should be DFSG free, and yes certain things (copyright notices, terms & conditions, and possibly things like the history section of a GFDL licensed document) can and should be non-modifiable. But non-modifiable sections should be quite limited in scope, and thus some things that might get appropriately (as per the GFDL) labeled as invariant (e.g., philosophical or historical commentary on the work) would make it non-DFSG free. Most people involved in the, er, discussion seem to be going with (2), or possibly (1). What surprises me is that only a couple of people have come out with (3). Certainly, from my naive perspective, (3) seems to be the obvious approach. I'm bothered by the idea that some hypothetical font-selector program author wouldn't be able to pull a couple of pages documenting keybindings from the emacs manual without including massive (compared to the size of the font-selecting program) amounts of invariant text. Is it really desirable that people be able to include a "History of the Making of Foo, and Why I Did It" marked invariant when they write foo? Should Debian be obliged to include it if they do? Because if that's not proper usage of the GFDL, I don't see where it's prohibited. So while I don't want to add fuel to the flame, especially as vituperative as this has gotten at times, I would like to hear why the people that have no problem with invariant sections feel that they don't run afoul of the DFSG. I'm assuming it's not *just* because it's coming from the FSF, and because we've had emacs in main for ages. Maybe it's me that's confused (that's quite possible), in which case I'd appreciate it if someone could enlighten me. But it seems to me that this issue hasn't really been resolved yet, and until it has been it's premature to worry about compromises and guidelines and such. -- Jeremy Hankins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333 9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03
