[libreplanet-discuss] GFDL with Invariant Sections or other unmodifiable parts. Was: Final Thesis: H-node

[Michael Dorrington]

On 11/05/13 11:31, Quiliro Ordóñez wrote:
> El 10/05/13 16:16, Fabian Rodriguez escribió:
>>
>>  but I believe publishing under a Creative Commons licence
>> wouldn't be considered free, specially if there is a "non-commercial"
>> use restriction. Perhaps other can provide a better opinion here.
> 
> The only free licenses Creative commons has are: CC-By-SA, CC-By and
> CC-0. The others are not free (as in freedom).

I posted in December 2012 and January 2013 to this list about how
including manuals which are under the GFDL with Invariant Sections or
other unmodifiable parts (which is similar to a CC with ND licence) in a
distribution makes that distribution non-free.  The FSF agree in this
article:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.html#opinions

where if you scroll up a paragraph from the "opinions" section, the
articles says:

"... recipes, computer programs, manuals and textbooks,
reference works like dictionaries and encyclopedias.  For all these
functional works, I believe that the issues are basically the same as
they are for software and the same conclusions apply.  People should
have the freedom even to publish a modified version because it's very
useful to modify functional works."

However, the FSF still distribute manuals under the GFDL with Invariant
Sections or other unmodifiable parts.

The FSF's "Guidelines for Free System Distributions" does not forbid the
inclusion of manuals under this licence so a distribution conforming to
those guidelines does not mean it is free.  And, for example, Trisquel
includes such manuals in its repo which (I assume) is setup on install
thus making Trisquel a non-free distribution.

For more of my argument see my previous post to this list:

[libreplanet-discuss] GFDL with Invariant Sections or other unmodifiable
parts. Was: Ubuntu malware: what to do?
<http://lists.libreplanet.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2013-01/msg00000.html>

How can we get the FSF to recognise this and so change the licence it
uses for its manuals to be a free one?

Regards,
Mike.

-- 
FSF member #9429
http://www.fsf.org/register_form?referrer=9429
http://www.fsf.org/about
"The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide
mission to promote computer user freedom and to defend the rights of all
free software users."

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