Re: I am ANGRY with Debian.

On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 12:24:47PM +0100, Nic James Ferrier wrote:
"Michael Marsh" <michael.a.marsh@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

On 5/30/07, Max Hyre <max@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
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."

To be clear about this:

I do not object to Debian organizing itself how it sees fit. I am not
a Debian developer; I may never be a Debian developer.

This is how the Debian process dealt with the issue:

http://www.debian.org/vote/2006/vote_001

and I respect that.

BUT I find it absolutely astounding that people think that this vote
is a basis for going round removing documentation without providing an
alternative.

"An alternative"? Re-writing the Emacs manual (IIRC this was the
sticking point early on in this thread) is not an easy task. At the
very least I would expect this to take some time. In the mean time, the
maintainer(s) still had to follow the DFSG and whatnot, so I cannot see
what choice they had...

And, to remove GNU documentation from Emacs is tantamount to
vandalism. It would be better to move the whole package to non-free
rather than remove the documentation. It's such an insane thing to do.

I can see your point - although my wording would have been somewhat less
radical. Separating the software and documentation is not a good thing.
But, alas, they were under different licences to start with :-|

I think your anger is misdirected - Debian behaves exactly as promised:
The DFSG rules. And moving the emacs documentation to non-free was a
logical consequence of it.

Of course... if lots of packages are moved to non-free I might as well
use ubuntu. I've never had to use non-free before.

Obviously you're free to do so. After all, Ubuntu isn't bound by the
DFSG, but something uncannily similar:
http://www.ubuntu.com/community/ubuntustory/licensing

Regards

--
Karl E. Jorgensen
karl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.jorgensen.org.uk/
karl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://karl.jorgensen.com
==== Today's fortune:
Parallel lines never meet, unless you bend one or both of them.

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