GFDL 1.3

[MJ Ray]

Alex Hudson <home at alexhudson.com> wrote:
>     <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html>
[...]
> Thoughts?

I think you're bang on.  Sadly, FSF is giving further reasons not to
trust it on copyleft and manuals.  Free software needs free software
documentation, but the FSF seems content to redefine "free" for
documentation, even to the point of introducing loopholes to help the
(generally non-free-software) Creative Commons licences.

This is quite an attitude change to past statments by RMS like "I
cannot endorse Creative Commons as a whole, because some of its
licenses are unacceptable. It would be self-delusion to try to endorse
just some of the Creative Commons licenses, because people lump them
together; they will misconstrue any endorsement of some as a blanket
endorsement of all. I therefore find myself constrained to reject
Creative Commons entirely."
http://web.archive.org/web/20061105211448/http://www.linuxp2p.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=10771

This U-turn also seems to be reflected in the GNU license list now.

> If the FSF were asked whether or not Debian (for example) could have the 
> Emacs manual under CC-BY-SA rather than the GFDL, I suspect they would 
> tell them to get lost, or words to that effect. [...]

Well, the words that RMS actually used when a debian developer asked
for manuals under the GPL were "the issue is not significant".
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/09/msg00391.html

> FSF have effectively been trusted with the power to relicense large 
> numbers of works. Using that power to solve other people's problems 
> seems a very slippery slope to me.

It's amazing how much influence one can get by dubious relicensing to
the FDL for a few years, isn't it?  Meanwhile, ordinary free software
developers can't even get bugs in the license drafting website to be
fixed and stay fixed...

FSF seems increasingly broken.  Is it time for a developer-led
organisation to fork its licences, so we can use "or later" again?

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)
Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
(Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237