Free Documentation License 1.3

Free Documentation License 1.3

Posted Nov 4, 2008 14:55 UTC (Tue) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793)
In reply to: Free Documentation License 1.3 by tialaramex
Parent article: Free Documentation License 1.3

What you shouldn't do though, is rip out those pages and pretend that they weren't part of the work because you personally didn't want to read them.

I believe that is the problem. You should have the option (freedom?) of ripping the pages you want. In the same way nothing prohibits you from writing smileys all over the book and drawing mustaches on the author picture. Also nothing prohibits you from giving that "vandalized" book to someone else (as long as you don't lie that it was the author himself who "vandalized" the book).

If someone makes a wonderful tutorial for, let's say, the command line but 50% of it is the glorification of the command line and rants against the GUI users, you could have a strong reason to keep the tutorial, because it's so wonderful, but strip the rest of the off-topic pages (if we assume the topic is not the rant).

I can't understand why a distro couldn't distribute that tutorial stripped, as long as it's introduced as part of the full tutorial. It may be what the license orders, but then I would blame the author for choosing that license and just forget about that particular tutorial.

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