Mathieu Roy wrote: >Matthew Garrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> a tapoté : >> "Authors", then. Please don't degenerate to pedanticism when the meaning >> is clear. > >Hum, I think you misunderstood my answer. I was not aware of this >issue in coreutils and I wonder about which author of ls we are >talking about.
It's a hypothetical example. I could insert a statement into coreutils that misrepresented the authors' political opinions without violating the license. >> The main purpose of documentation is not to make a political stand. > >It can be. If you describe why you wrote a software as free software, >you are making a political stand. No. That's a secondary purpose. >> Nor is it to describe why the software was written. > >It's up to the author of the documentation to decide what he thinks >important to be in the documentation he's writing. But that argument applies equally well to software, yet you believe that opinions in software should not be protected. >> Some people wish to include this in their documentation, and some >> people wish to include political statements in their software. The >> GFDL protects the first of these - the GPL does not protect the >> second. Why do you believe that they are different? > >If the GFDL invariant section was used to include political statement >that have nothing to do with computers (like racist statement, as >proposed before), I would find normal to trash these documentation >that use the GFDL invariant section for a purpose out of the scope of >Debian. So you classify some forms of political statement as more worthwhile? Which political statements should Debian accept? Which should it reject? >But a political stand about computers within a documentation >describing the software does not seems a problem to me: it documents >the software! It's the purpose of the documentation. While at the >contrary, including the manifesto within emacs, for instance, does not >require a protection (it's not a part of the software and can be >safely removed, if present). No, a political statement does not document the software. It tells us something about the author's motivations. Making a political statement within the software does exactly the same. Why do you believe that one should be protected and the other shouldn't? -- Matthew Garrett | [EMAIL PROTECTED]