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Re: GFDL/GPL issues
- From: Joe Buck <Joe dot Buck at synopsys dot COM>
- To: "Alfred M. Szmidt" <ams at gnu dot org>
- Cc: "bkoz at redhat dot com" <bkoz at redhat dot com>, "paul_koning at Dell dot com" <paul_koning at Dell dot com>, "kenner at vlsi1 dot ultra dot nyu dot edu" <kenner at vlsi1 dot ultra dot nyu dot edu>, "dnovillo at google dot com" <dnovillo at google dot com>, "dewar at adacore dot com" <dewar at adacore dot com>, "gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org" <gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org>, "iant at google dot com" <iant at google dot com>, "mark at codesourcery dot com" <mark at codesourcery dot com>, "richard dot guenther at gmail dot com" <richard dot guenther at gmail dot com>, "stevenb dot gcc at gmail dot com" <stevenb dot gcc at gmail dot com>
- Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2010 11:46:40 -0700
- Subject: Re: GFDL/GPL issues
- References: <4C52E1C0.6090400@codesourcery.com> <4C53696B.7030801@adacore.com> <4C536B50.4010402@codesourcery.com> <AANLkTikQ_ajAfJu8LkCjCP_tVBmZOkNgXFNmFHAMzTiY@mail.gmail.com> <11008022317.AA08984@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu> <E5A51D93-66B1-40E1-8431-34F8F11E5E6D@dell.com> <20100803162022.GU17485@synopsys.com> <20100804002105.744fb6af@shotwell> <20100804164618.GX17485@synopsys.com> <E1Oghrf-0001JK-3B@fencepost.gnu.org>
On Wed, Aug 04, 2010 at 10:34:51AM -0700, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
> You are being denied by RMS. He controls the copyright, the SC has
> no legal say, and he's stubborn as hell.
>
> When presented with weak arguments, then yes he will be stubborn but
> rightly so.
>
> I don't see what the problem is with two manuals, from a users
> perspective I actually prefer that and doing cross referencing between
> manuals in texinfo is easy.
OK, let's say Don Knuth decides he wants to spend his retirement
contributing to GNU. RMS is effectively saying that "literate
programming" is banned from the GNU project and Knuth can just go away if
he doesn't like it (and yes, requiring GFDL for documentation and GPL for
code is equivalent to banning literate programming). This is an
anti-software-freedom argument, an attempt by one man to impose his
personal taste.
For a class library, documentation generators are really the only
reasonable way to provide a maintainable manual. You need to make
sure that every inheritance relationship is described correctly, and
you need to make sure that, as interfaces change, they are described
consistently and accurately. The best way to achieve that is to
auto-generate the information. Sure, as a *user* it works equally
well for you if the maintainers have worked three times as hard to
do by hand what could be done by computer, but there's a high cost.