Re: debian and the fdl

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2003 at 04:35:31PM +0000, Pat Costello wrote:
> "John Fleck" <jfleck inkstain net> wrote:
> Re:Date: 21 Apr 2003 07:26:56 -0600
> 
> > There's an interesting discussion on the debian-legal list about whether
> > the GFDL is truly free and what the Debian community should do about it.
> 
> The FDL how-to says that invariant sections give you a way to express 
> nontechnical personal opinions. 
> 
> Scary. 
> 
> This is not a good idea in technical documentation. Although there are no 
> specific references as such in the GDSG to invariant sections, there is 
> lots of advice about not including personal opinions, wasting users time, 
> and eliminating superfluous information. Look in Chapter 1 and Chapter 8 
> for examples. Also, the implications for localization and accessiblity 
> of using invariant sections does not bear thinking about. 

Localisation is already "interesting", btw: one slightly hidden trap is
that if somebody translates the document (which modifies it -- the GFDL
does not distinguish between same-language editorial modifications and
translations), they are required by the GFDL to change the title to be
distinct from all existing versions of the document. It appears this can
be overridden by original author permission without contradicting the
license, so I have been adding a small statement in my recent GNOME
documents to the effect that title reuse is explicitly permitted. Some
of our documents are being translated by people outside of the GNOME
project (certainly outside the docs team) and just posted for others'
use, so this is not a case where we can just catch each instance as it
goes past on gnome-docs.

Malcolm

-- 
Many are called, few volunteer.