Re: I am ANGRY with Debian.

Michael Marsh wrote:
On 5/30/07, Max Hyre <max@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
_But_, please put anger aside a moment and examine the GFDL with
unbiased eyes. If a document has an invariant section, then you have a
file
a) with a lump of lead inside that has to be dragged around
with the document, forever, and
b) whose guts cannot be cut and pasted into other documents
without replicating that lump of lead, no matter how close or
distant the relation between the two documents.

You're not allowed to change or discard that lump. Isn't it at least
*understandable* that many believe this document is unfree?

Given one particular invariant section that always appears in FSF/GNU
GFDL'ed documentation, my preferred analogy is, "You can't skip the
commercials."


Except that in this case, the "commercial" is from the document's author. A slightly better analogy is the advertising clause of BSD license, which *is* considered a free license. In my opinion, all the analogies fall short because documentation is not software, regardless of Debian's dogmatic claims to the contrary.


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