[Fsf-Debian] Silent here

[Bryan Baldwin]

On 11/28/12 09:02, Andrei POPESCU wrote:
> Would you consider a message at program start that tells the user about 
> the program Author's opinion something useful? Do you think users should 
> have the freedom to remove the code doing that?

Such a message could be useful, or at least unobjectionable. However,
moving a GFDL invariant article to the program source code is a
different situation. No matter how trivial the article is, once its put
into source code, it is inevitable that it changes the way the program
behaves. This isn't analogous to GFDL invariant sections, because
non-technical articles in the documentation neither alter the way the
program behaves, nor prevent the technical articles of the documentation
from being kept up to date.

I noticed while reading the other day that I hadn't raised the
distinction between technical and non-technical writing in the
discussion until one of my more recent replies. I apologise for that. I
raised this argument to combat the notion that all documentation is
software, which is not true. Careful thought by the founders of the free
software movement has shown that documentation freedom issues are better
decided separately from software. But, if read without knowing the terms
of the GFDL which make this distinction clear, it might seem that I
think any and all articles in documentation could be invariant and be
free, which is also not true.