Sam Liddicott sam@liddicott.com writes:
Thanks for posting the debian osition statement.
It's not actually a statement of the Debian position (though it was drafted with the intention of becoming the official position); the Debian project has no official position on this. The 2006-001 General Resolution described an action to be taken by the Debian project w.r.t. works under the FDL, but did not explain the position leading to that action.
I didn't know thw GFDL was that deficient, but it clearly is. Chers to those who contributed on debian-legal.
You're welcome. Feel free to continue the discussion, especially if you can bring it closer to those who might listen at the FSF.
I'm of the opinion that documents are open to interpretation and processing by man or machine just as software
Perhaps, then, you would agree that all digital information — i.e. any bitstream (or "software", as opposed to its containing medium of hardware) — should be released with the same freedoms that the FSF currently promote only for programs, and that they should not attempt to distinguish programs from non-programs to determine what freedoms accrue.
My only explanation is that GFDL is written to solve a problem that isn't widely known yet...
As for that, RMS has made his own position clear as to the purpose of the FDL's unmodifiable sections. The purpose is denying essential freedoms to recipients of software that happens to be interpreted as documentation.
The goal of invariant sections, ever since the 80s when we first made the GNU Manifesto an invariant section in the Emacs Manual, was to make sure they could not be removed. [...]
Changing the GFDL to permit removal of these sections would defeat the purpose.
URL:http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/08/msg00807.html
Others associated with the FSF have expressed contrary opinions. Eben Moglen, for instance, made the insightful observation that:
In the digital society, it's all connected. We can't depend for the long run on distinguishing one bitstream from another in order to figure out which rules apply.
URL:http://old.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/anarchism.html
I don't know how these conflicting positions are resolved within the FSF. I hope the latter position gains mindshare within the FSF, and that the former is rejected.