GFDL vote... convince me

I can't really decide between the original GR and Amendment A.
Amendment B is obviously incoherent, but this strikes a chord:

Consequently when judging whether some license is free or not, one has
to take into account what kind of restrictions are imposed and how
these restrictions fit to the Social Contract of Debian:

4. Our priorities are our users and free software

We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software
community. We will place their interests first in our priorities.
Currently GFDL is a license acknowledged as free by the great mass of
the members of the free software community and as a result it is used
for the documentation of great part of the currently available free
programs. If Debian decided that GFDL is not free, this would mean
that Debian attempted to impose on the free software community alternative
meaning of free software, effectively violating its Social Contract
with the free software community.

Which makes me lean toward voting 4123 or 4213 (further discussion
ranked #1) instead of 1243 or 2143... thinking we really need to work
this out with the FSF and the community towards a better GFDL v2, not
issue divisive proclimations. I certainly don't relish ever having to
explain to someone why the GNU Free Documentation License issued by the
Free Software Foundation is in "non-free".

How are you voting? Why? Convince me.

Bonus question: Is GPLv3 draft DFSG-free? If not, why?

--
_ivan


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On Fri, Mar 10, 2006 at 11:26:24PM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote:
>... [Few of the people who
>have applied the GFDL to their work have even done so with a full
>knowledge of what the licence entails... take for example the
>surprising number of manuals with every section marked as invariant.]

I don't think that's limited to the GFDL. I'm sure that a large amount
of code is placed under the GPL/LGPL/Artistic/MPL/etc./ad-nauseum
without the author necessarily understanding all the details of the
chosen license.

My favourite extreme case being:

"Lol i just chucked that GPL thing on cos it looked neat."
-- http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=326491#r12

Which probably serves to highlight that the licence should be not only
fool-proof, but idiot-proof.

Programmers are not generally lawyers, and want in most cases (if they
bother at all) to slap some boiler-plate on the code and get on with the
job.

Having said that, I can understand the intent of the FSF's inclusion of
Invariant Sections and Transparent Copies (although the DRM thing just
seems like politics).

There have been issues with both the perlfaq and perlreftut licensing in
the Perl documentation. In both cases, the copyright holders were kind
enough to relax their licenses when asked.

Surely the case of inappropriate "Invariant Sections" can be handled
similarly to the way that any problem license issues have been handled
by Debian in the past: by politely pointing out to the author the error
of their ways... This results either in the license being changed, or
the documentation being excluded from the distribution.

Think of it as evolution in action.

--bod


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