My concerns about GPLv3 process

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   > Force and force... GNU maintainers agreed to follow the policies
   > of the GNU project, this is no different than say a Debian
   > maintainer

   As long as they make sense; the GFDL does not make any sense.

Putting documentation and software into the same box doesn't make
sense, the GFDL makes perfect sense on the other hand in my mind.

   Nobody at the FSF addressed the serious concerns many of us have
   with the GFDL.  In fact the GFDL hinders development of free
   documentation.

Do you have anything to back this up?  GFDLed documentation is free to
be shared, used, modified, and viewed, I fail to see how any of that
could hinder development of free documentation, on the contrary, it
would foster free documentation.
 
   > I strongly doubt that the two have anything in relation.

   The GFDL has been written with publishers in mind; look at the
   terms: most make sense only for woodware.  And later the own
   publishing branch ceases work?

Do you know why it stopped? I don't.  You are making claims without
evidence as far as I can see, i.e. it stopped, so lets blame the GFDL.
Maybe Lisa Goldstein (the person who started GNUpress) reordered
priorities and started doing other work.  I don't know, and as far as
I can tell, neither do you.  Making such baseless claims won't bring
anything to the discussion.  If you have anything to back this up,
please share.

   Have you seen any change on ORA's licenses?

I'm not sure what you mean.

   > clarifications (and simplifications, I find the license to long
   > and to complex), but none that are so grave that it is more
   > important than

   I can't grab a single short text from the very good glibc manual
   and use it with other projects - unless I add a bunch of useless
   attachments.

Yes you can, that is protected under fair use.

   It is simply not designed for sharing.

A GFDL document can be shared just as GPLed software.  The GFDL does
not put any chains on you as how you can share.  I think you are
making a similar (no offence meant) to what companies/people who
support non-free software make, `I cannot use a GPLed program in my
non-free program'.  I.e., you disagree how to actually share the
documentation.

   The GPL might be inconvenient for a publisher but it works far
   better for documentation.

I disagree.  There are many problems with applying the GPL to
documentation.  The GPL was designed for software in mind, other uses
tend to cripple the actual goal (the distinction between `binary' and
`source' comes to mind).

   I agree that plain texts are very different to software but
   documentation is clearly part of the code - at least it should be
   for any well written code.

I disagree strongly, a _reference_ manual should be part of the code,
this is something I could agree to.  But a documentation that
describes the software, say the Emacs manual, should not be part of
the source code since they are two very different works.

Cheers, and happy hacking!