Savannah rejects a project because it uses GPL

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   Let's agree to disagree, withough trying to read the other party's
   opinions with the wrong semantics (a problem that happens too often
   in our environment, bts).

This I can agree to. :-)

   Me:
   >    Later, after following the discussion in debian-legal and
   >    elsewhere, after thinking about it ourselves, we came to the
   >    conclusion that it has been a very risky choice, and we switched
   >    away from it in the next edition of the book.

   Alfred:
   > Could you share these conclusions?

   As I wrote, we switched away from the FDL, whose major problem in this
   specific context is the risk of proprietarization by third parties.

What risk for proprietarization?  I can't see how you could make a
free document into a non-free one.

   As for the discussion in debian-legal, the position statement
   already linked
   (http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml) is a
   good summary, although it became much bigger than what one can
   easily digest in reasonable time (I didn't, actually).

That position statement is sadly complete bunk, I have yet to get the
time to write a refutation for it.  Many, if not all, of the arguments
there are based on a complete misunderstanding of the license, and
what it actually says.

   Me:
   >    [...] derived works whose technical contents can't be folded
   >    back in the original manual.

   Alfred:
   > This is not entierly true, you can fold it back, but then you also
   > have to fold the invariant sections.  I think this is a prefectly
   > valid thing to require.

   I disagree. If the competing publishing house adds a chapter and a
   cover text stating that it's "A Nestlè book" (just to use fake names),
   I can't really reuse their added chapter in my next edition.

Why not? What is stopping you?  As far as I can see it, you do not
want to give credit to `Nestlè' for having written the chapter, one
could compare this to refusing to include the copyright notice in a
program, or similar.


Cheers!