Re: Profitable sales of free-culture Piecepack

[Ben Finney <ben+yahoogroups@...>]

Jorge Arroyo <trozo@...> writes:

> Hmmm... what makes a license Free or non-free? I always thought the
> FDL was free (I might be wrong)...

The FSF's position is inconsistent on this matter. It defines general
freedoms that recipients deserve, but then claims that recipients don't
deserve those freedoms in documentation.

    <URL:http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110704/15235514961/shouldnt-free-mean-same-thing-whether-followed-culture-software.shtml?cid=41>

(Some in the FSF attempt to get around this by claiming that the
copyright holder gets to declare that the work will never be used by
anyone as anything but documentation – in other words, that if the
copyright holder doesn't think a freedom would be useful to recipients,
then recipients don't deserve that freedom. This is, again, quite
inconsistent with the FSF's position on software freedom generally.)

This leads to imposing restrictions in the FDL that make it non-free
<URL:https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License#Criticism>.

The FDL's requirement to reproduce the entire FDL text in every derived
work makes it non-free, and quite problematic for distributing a small
booklet derived from the work, for example.

> 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%...

You're right, of course. That's why I've linked the heading “Free” to
the Free Culture definition site, and am using that to evaluate the
freedom of these works.

> Why not just state the license and let the reader decide how free they
> think it is?

That information is already available, so there's no “why not” about it
:-)

I am providing additional information: an evaluation of the license
against the Free Culture definition to determine whether the work is
free.

-- 
 &#92;       “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are |
  `&#92;    not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer |
_o__)                              to reality.” —Albert Einstein, 1983 |
Ben Finney