Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Freedomware distro

[MJ Ray]

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 08:19:10 +0100
John Rooke <address@hidden> wrote:

> [...] It does not include the
> right to distort the words of others, to abuse, slander or
> misrepresent them. Conventions exist to guard against these
> eventualities and the authors of the GNU-FDL have attempted to take
> account of these nuances.  It is insufficient to simply dismiss their
> attempts, by measuring them against a definition that was developed
> specifically for software.

Equally, it is insufficient to simply assert that the GNU-FDL is only
doing what is necessary to guard against things like
misrepresentation.

For example, what convention are invariant sections implementing?  It
looks an awful lot like they are implementing advertising, rather than
anything about misrepresentation. Misrepresentation could be addressed
by requiring accurate attribution or name changes - not by tying the
dead weight of an advert to the document.

Documents can be held as software and I think it's fine to apply the
standard of free software to documents so held.  Where it got messy is
when some well-meaning fools muddied the waters by defining "free
documentation" as a conflicting meaning rather than a complementary one!

But this is all well-trodden ground.  You pick your standard of freedom
and if it's free software, then debian and many other distributions
based upon it are there for you.  If it's free documentation, then
you've a smaller choice and slower development.

Regards,
-- 
MJR http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
Member of http://www.software.coop/ (but this email is my personal view
only)