Re: [libreplanet-discuss] The FSF Allows No Derivatives,

[Bryan Baldwin]

On 04/27/15 02:51, rysiek wrote:

Maybe we could at least try to keep it civil on this list, please?

#$%^&*(){"<<> is %^$)(@^$%ing ^&*(>)>

Several years ago volunteers of an organisation I worked for translated the 
following article:
http://ur1.ca/g5iwh

We reached out to FSF for permission to publish it; it has been ignored 
completely.

I stipulate that the fact that this text has not been available to 40 million 
Polish speakers worldwide may have been a larger net loss than potential for 
misrepresentation/mistranslation.

What? Why do you need to translate that article? It would have been great if you could, but FSF are not the sole distributors of such news. If you are worried that forty million Polish reader were deprived of this information, that's your fault. You were informed. You weren't handcuffed by this. You could have written your own article! It isn't like you have to reverse engineer a complex program to duplicate it, it's just a few paragraphs!

There is no clear distinction between "works of opinion" and the rest; as I 
have argued before, a "work of opinion" can be used as a base for work of art, 
or an educational endaevour, or otherwise. This distinction is as artificial, 
as it is harmful.

With the license, the distinction is as simple as placing the text into the section licensed as immutable for the reason "I say this is my opinion." So what if it is educational? So what if it is "art." What difference does it make?

I would be worried that this could be used as a loophole to lock away useful information, except it can't. Even if you tried, I could simply copy or paraphrase your text, put it in my mutably or immutably licensed text and say its my opinion distinct from yours even it if says the same thing. What I can't do is make a copy, change what it says, and say it's yours.

The ridiculousness of this thread is that there is no useful example of exploitation of this clause. Its rhetorical nonsense.

The original purpose of immutable clauses in the GFDL is to prevent third parties from removing the political and social commentary that the authors added to explain why they started the project. And they were right, because there were people who were just gagging to get rid of it. When they discovered they couldn't, they were butthurt and ran off and invented "open source." And that's fine, too.

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