Re: [directory-discuss] s/w that requires a middleman to liberate it -- is it free?

[Svetlana Tkachenko]

There is a distinction between "this documentation is free" and "there is a freedom-respecting way to get it", so I am going to give an example.

We have a freedom to have clean hands. Were we required to make our hands dirty in order to obtain a manuscript, it would be bad. However, the obtained manuscript would possibly be clean inside, and you would be able to give it to your friend without making their hands dirty. This cleanness of hands and cleanness of manuscript are distinct concepts. Their subject -- what the freedom applies to -- is different.

• One is the cleanness of our hands -- of the tool used to retrieve the manuscript. We are grateful to a library for storing manuscripts cleanly.
  
• Another is cleanness of the manuscript itself -- the content. We're grateful to the book publisher for printing a clean manuscript and providing a box for it which does not leak.
  

Likewise, freedom of the documentation hosting website and freedom of the documentation itself are different concepts and must not be mixed or confused. Once you have overcome the obstacle of non-free website (for example, by asking me to host a copy), the obtained documentation is free. While biting the webmaster for not distributing it appropriately, we need to be grateful to the documentation author for fact that it is free and we need to recognise it.

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Svetlana Tkachenko

Member of the Free Software Foundation

www.gnu.org www.fsf.org