| |||||||||||||
Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessmentZacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessmentPosted Jul 4, 2012 18:09 UTC (Wed) by scientes (guest, #83068)In reply to: Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment by nijhof Parent article: Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment
It would be great if the FSF would remove back-cover, front-cover, and invariant sections from their docs, perhaps by just removing the invariant sections that they deem particularly "special" to a publishing on their web site.
Even better, they could re-license (or dual-license) these docs under the GPL or compatible, which I (and Debian) find perfectly fine for documentation. This would allow incorporation of Docs into programs, (and potentially visa-versa)
(Log in to post comments)
The GPL is not fine for documentation ... Posted Jul 5, 2012 6:22 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] ... because every time it is used that way, it induces large numbers of people to violate copyright. Let's say you GPL a document, and you prepared it with LaTeX. That means LaTeX is the source code, the preferred form for modifying the work. If I give someone a PDF of the document without the LaTeX, or without a written offer, good for three years, to provide the LaTeX on request, I'm a violator. But since people don't understand that, everyone breaks the rules. Only the copyright holder has standing to sue, but some day some copyright holder of GPLed software, say Oracle, will be a jerk about it.Likewise, if you create an image with the GIMP and GPL it, a JPEG or PNG of the image does not suffice for distribution. The XCF has to be retained, and made available to any recipient of the image. That doesn't mean I would argue for the FSF's documentation licenses as they have all kinds of problems. The Creative Commons licenses are better for non-software free media.
The GPL is not fine for documentation ... Posted Jul 5, 2012 14:07 UTC (Thu) by jthill (guest, #56558) [Link] Likewise, if you create an image with the GIMP and GPL it, a JPEG or PNG of the image does not suffice for distribution. The XCF has to be retained, and made available to any recipient of the image.I think that's not true, that you can license your own work in any form on any terms. If you offer a GPL'd XCF then redistributors have to offer that as well, but if you separately or only offer a GPL'd JPEG, redistributors only need to offer that.
The GPL is not fine for documentation ... Posted Jul 6, 2012 4:43 UTC (Fri) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]
You can, but redistributors cannot. If they modify the XCF, they cannot distribute it as JPG alone, because it's not the preferred form for modification.
|
|||||||||||||