On Fri, 10 Feb 2006 12:43:30 +0200, Anton Zinoviev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> The interpretation that I hold is the following: > The license must give us permissions to modify the work in > order to adapt it to various needs or to improve it, with no > substantive limits on the nature of these changes, but there can be > superficial requirements on how they are packaged. I'm a bit surprised nobody has brought this up yet (but maybe I'm just crazy): invariant sections prevent improvements to the invariant sections. Leaving aside the (seemingly) highly charged issue of the Emacs manual and the GNU Manifesto, let's go into the fantasy world. Let's say that I write some software, and some documentation for it. Suppose that I license the documentation under the GFDL, and I include an essay about why I like free software as an invariant section. Suppose that I make some good, new, convincing arguments (that's where the fantasy comes in), but my writing style is a bit off at times (that part would be reality). And then there's that part where I go off on a tangent about my pet platypus... Since the essay is an invariant section, it prevents anyone from taking my essay, keeping the good bits, fixing my terrible writing style (and correcting my tpyos), and turning it into something that you could put on a manager's desk and convince them of the value of using and developing free software. Is that not a useful modification? P.S. For those who say that we don't have software licenses that include non-modifiable bits because they prevent useful modifications, is the following a free software license? /* Permission is granted for distribution of verbatim or modified copies of this program in source or binary forms under the condition that contents of the variable "invariant" are not deleted or modified, and that you do not prevent the compiler from including its contents from the resulting binary. */ #include <stdio.h> char *invariant = "My pet aardvark likes free software because... {insert essay here}"; int main (void) { printf ("This program does something useful.\n"); return 0; } -- Hubert Chan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - http://www.uhoreg.ca/ PGP/GnuPG key: 1024D/124B61FA Fingerprint: 96C5 012F 5F74 A5F7 1FF7 5291 AF29 C719 124B 61FA Key available at wwwkeys.pgp.net. Encrypted e-mail preferred.
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