Re: [piecepack] Re: Profitable sales of free-culture Piecepack

[Nick Moffitt <nick@...>]

Jorge Arroyo:
> Hmmm... what makes a license Free or non-free? I always thought the
> FDL was free (I might be wrong)... Anyway, is there a definition of
> what Free means exactly in this context? Because I don't think this is
> going to be something where everyone is going to agree 100%... Why not
> just state the license and let the reader decide how free they think
> it is?

Trying to avoid debate here, but the GFDL is a license that was written
as part of the goals of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU
project.  The goals of these organizations is to promote the freedom of
software users, and they had traditionally used the "copyleft" GPL
license to cover both the functional works (programs, data, etc) and the
manuals.

The GFDL has a concept of "invariant sections", which I believe (though
I haven't verified this extensively) were intended for non-technical
text such as the philosophical statements of the FSF.  They did not want
to permit or encourage, say, a modified copy of the GNU Manifesto
calling for the replacement of all elementary school teachers with
unrefrigerated jars of mayonnaise.  They also wanted the philosophical
documentation to be included with all manuals in which it featured.

Five years ago the Debian project (which was the first to have a formal
set of criteria for a free license that went beyond the FSF's more
qualitative approach) voted on a resolution that declared the GFDL
insufficiently free to be valid in its main body of software:

http://www.debian.org/vote/2006/vote_001
> The GFDL conflicts with traditional requirements for free software in
> a variety of ways, some of which are expanded upon below. As a
> copyleft license, one of the consequences of this is that it is not
> possible to include content from a document directly into free
> software under the GFDL. 

I continue to use either the GPL or CC-BY-SA (2.0 or later, typically US
or UK) for most of my non-functional text works.  

What's also important to note in this frustration about the CC licenses
including non-free variants is the relative goals of the FSF/GNU project
and the CC project.  The FSF hopes to promote intellectual freedom for
software users.  The Creative Commons people are working to restore a
commons of cultural works.  They overlap, to be sure, but each thus far
has done an admirable job of achieving what they set out to do.

-- 
"Some of us figured out in the 1950s
that blacklists were a bad idea.
Some of us have that lesson still ahead of us."
           -- John Gilmore, on RBLs.