"Alfred M. Szmidt" wrote: [...] > >From offical dutites, yes, because Thomas went against the policies of > the GNU project (outright refusing to use the GFDL in a GNU project
Interesting. So much about GNU freedom of speech. ------- Start of forwarded message ------- Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2003 11:33:16 -0800 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Thomas Bushnell, BSG) Subject: What's up with the GFDL? To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Spam-Level: Richard Stallman is pushing an anti-free license for documentation. By that, I mean, a license for documentation which, if it were used for software, would unquestionably be understood as unfree. There are many negative consequences of this action: 1) The Debian Project, which is committed to free software, cannot distribute GFDL'd manuals as part of the Debian system. This is ironic in the extreme, because RMS used to complain that Debian was too loose about distributing non-free things. Now Debian is too tight for him. 2) It is not possible to borrow text from a GFDL'd manual and incorporate it in any free software program whatsoever. This is not a mere license incompatibility. It's not just that the GFDL is incompatible with this or that free software license: it's that it is fundamentally incompatible with *any* free software license whatsoever. So if you write a new program, and you have no commitments at all about what license you want to use, saving only that it be a free license, you cannot include GFDL'd text. 3) The FSF solicited public comment on the GFDL, but this seems to have been a deceptive enterprise. The goal seems to have been to garner public support for it, and that simply failed. So the FSF does not trumpet that little public comment, and has issued no explanation of why such a widely unpopular documentation license should be used. 4) RMS has now "dismissed" me as Hurd maintainer because I have publicly spoken against the GFDL, saying that a GNU maintainer must support and speak in favor of GNU policies. If this is really RMS's reason, then it means that he demands the right to control the speech of every GNU volunteer when it comes to GNU project policies. He wants not merely to set the direction, but also to require that each and every one of us publicly support a GNU policy when asked to. I do not know what the right response is. I believe perhaps the best thing to do is to create structures for GNU project volunteers to express their opinions so that we can even find out what the GNU project thinks. Heretofore, RMS has been an able spokesman, but when he disregards the comments of volunteers (even when explicitly solicited), works against free software, and attempts to control the speech of GNU volunteers in talking about such issues, something has gone very wrong. I suspect that nothing will happen, and the sad result will be that while free software will continue to thrive, the GNU project will die. I do not know what would prevent that. Thomas Technical Addendum - ------------------ The incompatibilities of the GFDL with free software are not controversial. There are two central problems. First, GFDL'd manuals can contain "invariant sections" which cannot be changed or removed. This is a restriction on modification which isn't permitted for free software licenses. Moreover, it is not a trivial restriction or one that imposes minimal costs. Invariant sections can be very large, and the pieces of a GFDL'd manual that one wants to copy might be small. (For example, a description of how to use a single function, if copied from the Emacs manual, requires the inclusion of many kilobytes of extraneous text from invariant sections.) Such restrictions are not allowed in free software licenses. Second, there are restrictions on what formats a GFDL'd manual can be distributed in, which work to prohibit encryption and the like. No such restriction exists for free software licenses. ------- End of forwarded message ------- regards, alexander. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
