Re: Why GnuZilla?

[David Kastrup]

John Hasler <john@dhh.gt.org> writes:

> Alfred M. Szmidt writes:
>> [gNewSense] only includes free documentation.
>
> I wrote:
>> No GFDL documents with "front cover texts", "back cover texts" or
>> "invariant sections"?
>
> Alfred M. Szmidt writes:
>> Such documents are also free documents, so are verbatim only documents.
>
> Debian does not agree.  Neither do I.  However, neither Debian nor I
> have denounced the FSF as anti-freedom because of this disagreement.

The difference is that the FSF considers different aspects important for
the freedom of documents and of software.  One of most important
differences between those licenses is that the GFDL is not a public
license: the original licensor can include things that the general
public can't remove when copying or modifying.

GFDL-licensed works meet neither the Debian nor the FSF free software
guidelines.  However, Debian has chosen to just apply one standard to
both documentation and software.  Thus it considers GFDLed documentation
with invariant passages as non-free software.  I don't think that the
FSF would come to a different conclusion, it's just that they consider a
different question important.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum