[iDC] Free Manuals for Free Software (and the ethics of collaborative critique)

adam hyde adam at flossmanuals.net
Wed Oct 15 15:18:29 UTC 2008


hi Biella,

Ok...so your points have sunk into my lethargic brain like a rock in
mud. Your comments are spot on, and I will amend the article to include
more of the Debian arguments in there. Many thanks for spending the time
on such a useful critique.  

On the topic of the FDL...have you, or has anyone, heard about the
progress of the FDL and sFDL redraft? The process seems to have
stalled...I heard a rumour that the FSF was rethinking the 'get out of
the FDL free' position with regard to Wikipedia...any idea what is going
on there?

adam




On Thu, 2008-10-09 at 10:28 -0400, Gabriella Coleman wrote:
> Adam,
> 
> My comments below only pertain to the indigenous (i.e. developer) 
> critiques of the FDL which I think are worth mentioning in just few 
> paragraphs for reasons I details below. In short, it can bolster your 
> argument and I think it is the ethically right thing to do (details below).
> 
> I have some other comments about the rest of your essay, which is so 
> spot on and I just want to point to one resource that can help with the 
> question of documentation (insight's drawn from Richard Sennet's recent 
> book, the Craftsman) but that email is for later.
> 
>  >
>  > I was trying to avoid that argument a little because Debian seemed to
>  > endorse the FDL as long as 'invariant sections' were not present in the
>  > text. My point is that the FDL is more fundamentally crippled because of
>  > its embedded rationale - to support a small business publishing model.
>  > It seemed to me that Debian critiqued the formal legal freedoms and gave
>  > the license a 'pass' under certain circumstances without addressing the
>  > tangled rationale that makes the license a real mess.
> 
> 
> If one reads and follows the debates  (though it was a multi-month, 
> nearly year long debate so it requires some time), they do address the 
> "tangled" rationale (they love to debate the law, after all and are 
> logic fetishist too).
> 
> What is most clear is that most vehemently opposed the FDL (and many 
> noted the irony that Stallman supported a non-free license).  Here is 
> just one place where they attacked the rationale using a lot of their 
> own “rationales”
> 
> http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml
> 
> which concludes:
> 
> “It is not possible to borrow text from a GFDL'd manual and
>    incorporate it in any free software program whatsoever.
>    This is not a mere license incompatibility.  It's not just
>    that the GFDL is incompatible with this or that free
>    software license: it's that it is fundamentally incompatible
>    with any free software license whatsoever.
>    So if you write a new program, and you have no commitments
>    at all about what license you want to use, saving only that
>    it be a free license, you cannot include GFDL'd text.
> 	
> The GNU FDL, as it stands today, does not meet the Debian
>    Free Software Guidelines.  There are significant problems
>    with the license, as detailed above; and, as such, we
>    cannot accept works  licensed unde the GNU FDL into our
>    distribution.”
> 
> I also think it is incorrect to say they endorse the FDL just because 
> they allow its use under certain conditions. If one looks at what the 
> majority of Developers do with their own documentation, they basically 
> steer entirely clear of the FDL and this sends a very strong message 
> that the FDL is broken/sucks/unworthy/not right etc.
> 
> The majority of developers use the GPL for their documentation because 
> they also feel like documentation must be open to modification. Or they 
> don't even use a separate license, because they see documentation and 
> software as fundamentally connected and thus feel it should enjoy all 
> the freedoms that software has.
> 
> They were just stuck and struck with the problem that they had GNU/FSF 
> documentation in the distribution and basically by passing the GR, which 
> made the FDL permissible only under certain conditions, they disabled 
> the most onerous restriction in the FDL that made it unfree according to 
> th DFSG (and as a result they also had to migrate a number of GNU/FSF 
> documentation to non-free).
> 
> I think this resolution sends a pretty strong message, which says the 
> FDL is broken, we don't support it, and if you must use it, you can use 
> it only under these conditions (and alas, no one uses it! :-). And 
> again, the most important fact may not be the GR but the fact that 
> developers themselves don't use the FDL. They just had to do something 
> about it since they do have GNU/FSF documentation in the distro and had 
> to make a decision about how to treat it.
> 
> Anyone who has gotten this far (probably just Adam) is thinking: "wow, 
> she is really nitpicky and knows just a little bit too much about Debian 
> politics!" In other words, why belabor this point?
> 
> I think it is important for two reasons, one that has to do with your 
> own argument and the other about the ethics of collaboration not in 
> realm of technology but in the realm of political critique.
> 
> I think mentioning Debian's native critique can bolster your own 
> arguments. If there is a small army of developers who question the FDL, 
> well there must be something really off with the license, no? The 
> difference here is between one person making a statement vs. a group of 
> people making a statement. There is a power that comes from numbers. 
> What people do, in other words, can be marshalled as a great source of 
> evidence.
> 
> Finally, if we are inspired by  F/OSS because developers collaborate and 
> work together to find technical solutions, I think it is ethically 
> important to recognize they also collaborate in the realm of ethics and 
> law as well and we can chose to be part of the conversation or fork ours 
> and make no connection to existing ones.
> 
> Without even mentioning their vigorous debate and the heart of their 
> critique and their solution, you risk portraying your critique of the 
> FDL as something new. But in fact some version of  of it has existed 
> within the very developer community and for years.
> 
> In the spirit of collaboration, I would stake your own claim about the 
> FDL, but also note how you are contributing to and extending an existing 
> conversation. Too often developers are portrayed as closed minded 
> tech-wonks who care for nothing but technology. This is patently wrong. 
> They are thinking through these legal/ethical issues and it analytically 
> and politically pays to pay attention to what they are saying even if it 
> has its limits.
> 
> That being said, this does not mean Debian needs to be the sole or 
> primary focus of your essay. No way. Your arguments are your own, they 
> are strong and most important, are written in a way that the 
> non-developer world can munch on, digest, and understand (and you are 
> calling for a new way to write documentation and this is the real heart 
> of your essay and why this project is important and new and must go 
> forward).
> 
> But just couple of paragraphs on Debian's critiques (and perhaps the 
> limits of their critique as well) would boost your own arguments and 
> connect your critique to the existing history of debate over the FDL.
> 
> Maybe I am totally off here so I would love to hear if this is just 
> makes things more complicated? Again I like to think our critique is 
> collective as well as individual so I like to think about how we honor 
> and make explicit whenever we can.
> 
> 
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-- 
Adam Hyde
Founder FLOSS Manuals
http://www.flossmanuals.net



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