Debian GNU/Linux to Declare GNU GFDL non-Free?

Syntaxis writes "There's some considerable argy-bargy in progress over whether or not GNU's own GFDL is a Free documentation license at all. At issue are "invariant sections" which cannot be removed from derivative works. Check out the thread culminating in the proposed motion to take action. The current consensus on Debian-legal does indeed appear to be that one of the FSF's own licenses is non-Free under the terms of the Debian Free Software Guidelines! Well, documentation for GPLed projects countermanding the very freedoms embodied in the GPL certainly seems insane to me."

Comments

Lack of pragmatism

[Eloquence]

People who choose the FDL usually know little about its specifics -- they just want their documentation to be available under a copyleft license. Thus, virtually all FDL documents are free of invariant sections. Instead of condemning the license outright, a pragmatic approach would therefore be to define a threshold of invariant content (say, 20%), after which a document is no longer considered free. The FDL is the standard license for free, open content (see also Wikipedia, perhaps the largest open content project), and ostracizing it entirely will get us nowhere.

Upon reading the post, however, what I see is a bean counter mentality that can really be dangerous to open source projects as a whole. I shudder at the thought of hundreds of package maintainers being contacted to deal with this "license issue", which is really a non-issue to anyone with some common sense. This time would better be spent working on real problems -- it's not like Debian has none of those ...

Re:Debian has some weird licencing rules.

[Mendax Veritas]

You obviously don't understand what the Debian project is all about. It isn't just a Linux distro; it is specifically a free software distro. They don't want anything that isn't free-as-in-liberty. That's why they have the licensing rules that they do.

Re:If you want true open source on anything

[BJH]

In case you didn't realise, any works completely of your creation can be used in any way you like, as you're the sole copyright holder.

So the only case where you wouldn't be able to take a work you've released under GPL and include it in a closed source application is where you've either (a) originally taken source that was under GPL or similar and added to it or (b) applied patches from people where those patches were supplied in the understanding that the resulting app would be released under GPL or similar license.

In other words, your comment about releasing your own works into the public domain because it gives you more freedom are wrong.

Re:Same with GPL

[Mendax Veritas]

Either you're trolling, or you don't understand the issue. Of course you can't change the license; that would make no sense. The issue has to do with the fact that the GFDL allows portions of the licensed document to be marked "invariant", meaning you can't change those parts. This is logically equivalent to what you would have if the GPL allowed authors to mark parts of their source code as unmodifiable. It essentially means that the document is not entirely free, but only mostly free. The debate within Debian has been about whether "mostly free" is good enough.

Re:how?

[demi]

You'll see that the FSF is concerned with free documentation as well. The problem here is that some people are misunderstanding the invariant section provision of the FDL. As stated in that link, not every piece of writing is the same thing as software. The FDL insists that all the technical instructions be freely modifiable so that someone who creates a derivative piece of software can also modify the manual to keep it accurate.

However, some parts of a manual might be literary or express an author's opinion. This might be a political opinion ("software should be free") or it could be a technical opinion ("monolithic kernels suck"). But whatever it is it doesn't make sense for the creator of a derivative manual to change those opinions--that would be lying about the original author's intent.

The FDL recognizes that an author may have the need to guard these sections (remember, they can't have anything to do with the instructions to use the program). It doesn't make the manual any less free.

I've used the FDL for code restrictive purposes

[azzy]

When I finished my MSc last year, I had to publish my thesis, and sourcecode. The university instructued us that the thesis had to claim them as the copyright owners, as they had a claim over our code and report. The lecturers were aware that we would maybe want to contest this, and noted that we'd probably have a fair point as we had never signed away our IP rights.. yet in order to be accepted our reports MUST contain the copyright info as stated, unless a alternative was agreed. I got my course director to accept the FDL as a license on my work in which I claimed the copyright, and I published my source code as an invariant section. As no other license/copyright info appeared on my sourcecode either printed or on disk, I essentially made them unable to claim ownership of it and make modifications.

Now I don't have any objections to the GPL or freedom over sourcecode in principle, I just didn't want them to claim ownership and rights over it.

So I was thankful that the invariant clause of the FDL allowed me to restrict the published sourcecode.

My take on this may be wrong, IANAL, but seemed to be the case, hence why I did it.

Allowing removal would be enough.

[dark-nl]

Imagine this scenario: someone takes your book which is dedicated to Martin Luther King, then adds a lot of useful stuff to it, and then attaches a rant explaining how Adolf Hitler is much cooler than King and the original author was a wuss for choosing the wrong person to dedicate the book to. And then makes that rant an Invariant Section.

Now you can't use any of that new documentation in the next version of your book, unless you're willing to take the pro-Hitler rant as well. But the other person is free to take your new material, as long as he is willing to take any new Invariant Sections you add. This is the opposite of what copyleft is supposed to achieve.

None of this would be an issue if the GFDL allowed removal of Invariant Sections.

Re:Why it makes the manual less free

[demi]

The FDL doesn't cancel existing fair use doctrine--in general short excerpting or commenting on a copyrighted work is fine, just as you can quote a book in a review of it. If the excerpt's not short (namely if you are copying large parts of the manual) then I think it's reasonable to have to include invariant sections. Elsewhere on this thread I pointed out that excising something can change the meaning of the whole just as modifying something can.

A third solution for your excerpting would be to incorporate the other manual by reference ("see section 12 of the GNU make manual") or whatever.

Not to put words in your mouth, but I anticipate an objection on the basis: "who's to know what fair use is?" There is a FAQ on fair use that helps, but the fact is that fair use is based on judgment, not absolute rule.