The Man-Page is Free, GPC's info files are Free and the compiler itself is Free. So please do not move those things into "non-free". Do you (the Debian team) really think, our documentation is propritary?
did you actually look at the given URL?
Yes, but the information is quite disorganized at that URL so it's easy to miss the pertinent facts unless you read closely. I did on my first glance through it.
Could you please give a short line about things we have to do in order to have a Free documentation and fulfill the Debian point of views about this issue.
In the middle of the page is the section that explains the problem:
**** The Problem ~~~~~~~~~~~
The GNU FDL includes a number of conditions, which apply to all modified versions, that disallow modifications. In particular, these are:
* K. For any section Entitled "Acknowledgements" or "Dedications", Preserve the Title of the section, and preserve in the section all the substance and tone of each of the contributor acknowledgements and/or dedications given therein.
* L. Preserve all the Invariant Sections of the Document, unaltered in their text and in their titles. Section numbers or the equivalent are not considered part of the section titles.
However, modifiability is a fundamental requirement of the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which state:
3. Derived Works
The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.
As such, we cannot accept works that include "Invariant Sections" and similar unmodifiable components into our distribution, which unfortunately includes a number of current manuals for GNU software. ****
Interesting issue, how to preserve credit without stopping modifications. Quite amusing since whenever I've released free source code, my license has often been simply "You can do anything you want with it as long as you give me credit", and while this is *much* freer than GPL, it retains what the FDL is trying to accomplish (although since it's not specific about modifications, so it might still pass the Debian Freeness test).
At 3:53 PM +0200 24/5/03, Eike Lange wrote:
But GPL, LGPL and GNU-FDL _are_ invariant ["...but changing is not allowed"]
This is actually irrelevant - the license that the allows the various things to be copied at all includes provision for the license to be included. Modifying the license as written would have no actual effect except to confuse people since the stuff is all distributed under specific published licenses and those license specify the requirements - distributing without including those licenses in unmodified form would be a violation of the license.
Enjoy, Peter.