Re: Skills classification -- proposal & questions

[Richard Stallman]

    Some fonts have not logic, just data. However, actually fonts tend to 
contain 
    bytecode. Actually, the bytecode interpreter is enabled in most 
    distributions, including Debian.  Are fonts Software, Data or Art?

As you say, font files are software.  They have to be free.

    Must Free Software distributions include only free fonts or is it allowed 
to 
    include non-free fonts?

They should only contain free fonts.

    Must Free Software distributions include only free Documentation or is it 
    allowed to include non-free Documentation?

They should include only free documentation.

    If Data is crucial to make a program useful, should it be just as free as 
its 
    Software?

If the data is crucial to making it function, it should be free.

    It is fine to sell a computer game

"To sell" could be misleading, since you can sell copies of
free software.  See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html.


                                       with non-free graphics and sound as long 
as 
    the code is free?

Yes.  In these cases, I expect that one particular set of graphics and
sound is not crucial to the code's functioning -- it could (and often
does) work with other game data.

However the art has to be at least sharable (permission to
noncommercially redistribute exact copies).

                       So e.g. OpenTTD is fine because the code is free, you 
just 
    need proprietary data files.

I don't recall hearing about OpenTTD before.  So I know nothing about it.
If the "data files" are art, then they don't have to be free, just sharable.

    Why Software must follow the 4 freedoms but not Data, Hardware, 
Documentation 
    or Art?

In general I think that functional information must be free.  Software
is functional information.  Documentation is functional information.
Some data is functional information.  All that must be free.

Art is a different issue.  See my speeches on Copyright vs Community.

As for hardware, the question of free or not in this sense is not meaningful
since there is no source code and there are no copiers.

      'Almost-Free Software'  Ubuntu, etc.

It would be better to call Ubuntu "partially-free".
Ubuntu is made of many programs; some are free and some are not.

Why do you want to use this category?  How would it be relevant?