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Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Re: New auctex version coming, and the freeze


From: Frank Küster
Subject: Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Re: New auctex version coming, and the freeze
Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 08:58:15 +0200
User-agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.0.50 (gnu/linux)

Reiner Steib <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 01 2006, Frank Küster wrote:
>
> [...]
>> http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml.
>> The FSF has more or less clearly (sometimes in fact less) stated
>> that they intend to interpret these clauses in a free,
>> DFSG-compliant way for the documents they publish.  But that doesn't
>> guarantee that other copyright holders who use the license do the
>> same, and in fact it can't guarantee that the FSF will continue to
>> do so.
>
> Could you please explain this paragraph in more detail?

Well, I'm not sure whether you are asking about what could be interpreted
as non-free, and how the FSF has promised to interpret instead, or
whether you want to know about the problem with other copyright
holders.  

As for the first issue, one particularly problematic point is the overly
broad anti-DRM clause.  FSF representatives have said that they would
not try to sue anybody for, for example, including a filesystem with a
GFDL'ed manual on it in a backup that gets protected by a password.  I'm
not sure what they said about the problem of including such a manual on
a medium that is meant to be used on a hardware that only accepts
DRM-protected media, if at the same time you also provide a non-DRM
protected medium with the same content.

As for the second issue:  The FSF also recommends the GFDL as a
documentation license for external projects.  But they have no say about
how such other projects interpret the license.  Since most external
projects do not collect copyright assignments, even the project members
have no control about how the license is interpreted:  It's sufficient
that one member, or the company or relatives who inherited one member's
intellectual property rights, starts sueing people for license
infringement.  And you all know that similar things have happened for
purely economical reasons...

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)




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