Re: Copyright question

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 06:48:27PM -0400, Richard M Stallman wrote:
> Debian's policy starts from good motives, but they were too rigid in
> carrying them out, and reached a foolish conclusion.  I wish they would
> change it, but I can't make them change it.
 
There are many intelligent men and women of good will who, after a great
deal of agonising over the matter, have reached a different conclusion.
However one sees it, the current situation is one great big pain in the
association list.

Nearly everybody agrees there are problems with the current GFDL.  For
example, in the CC Mode manual, there is a page "Sample .emacs file".  If
anyone were to copy this page into her .emacs and modify it (which is the
whole idea), she would then have to license her .emacs under the GFDL
before passing it on.  This is ludicrous.

If anyone wanted to condense this manual into a short snappy reference
card, they would end up printing the cover texts, the invariant sections,
together with the GFDL, the said snappy reference "appearing" (if that is
the right word) somewhere in the tome, almost as an afterthought.  This
isn't much less ludicrous.

It would be nice if the GFDL could be revised to fix these (and other)
ludicrosities.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).