[Fsf-Debian] Silent here

[Bryan Baldwin]

On 11/27/12 09:22, Andrei POPESCU wrote:
> You seem to imply that it is fine for an Author to include his/her 
> opinions in documentation, possibly in a Invariant Section of a document 
> licensed under the GFDL. I disagree.
>
> IMO documentation needs *at least* the same freedoms as software, since 
> software without proper documentation can be completely useless[1]. I 
> see absolutely no value in Authors' personal opinions in some Invariant 
> Section, that I'm not even allowed to remove. There are blogs for that.
>
> [1] no, the source is not documentation, unless we are talking about 
> "Hello world!" programs.

I agree, source and documentation are separate entities. And that the
the technical portion of documentation must have modification
permissions to be free. Its obvious. In that respect, the GFDL is very
scrupulous in describing what can be put in invariant sections in order
to avoid any other situation. I don't think the GFDL is perfect, but its
good enough and unobjectionable to use as is.

I diverge from your opinion where non-technical writing is concerned.
The history of a project, autobiographical material provided by the
authors in their own words, and the social impetus and purpose of the
program are equally valuable articles to be distributed with the program
inside the documentation. Users do not need to have modification
permissions over such material, because its presence in its original
unmolested form has no impact on their freedom, and modification isn't
necessary to control the way their computers behave.

Mr. Kete said that modification permissions do not need to be omitted
because it is not necessary to prevent modification to defend yourself
from misrepresentation, presumably in litigation. However, that is not
the purpose of invariant sections. I do not think that Dr. Stallman was
worried about having to prove which was his real opinion in court
because evil hordes of revisionists might have mangled the original text
of the GNU Manifesto. He was concerned that irresponsible parties would
want to take away other people's privilege to read it. And he was right.

Saying that non-technical writing should be removed because it belongs
in a blog is saying that things you don't like are eligible for
unlimited censorship, decided by you, for users downstream. And you back
up that analysis by complaining that you aren't allowed to remove the
things that you don't like, not only for yourself, but for anyone else
who might benefit from having them included in their original,
unmolested form. If you want to delete that stuff from your computers,
good on you. But when you've decided to do that for me, you've done me
an injury.