Re: GFDL/GPL issues

[Basile Starynkevitch <basile@starynkevitch.net>]

On Wed, 2010-05-26 at 11:19 -0700, Mark Mitchell wrote:
> 
> As for practical advice regarding getting quicker decisions from the FSF
> on licensing issues, I have none.  I've worked on several such issues
> with the FSF over the years, and they've all been lengthy processes.  If
> I knew how to do it faster, I certainly would.  The best way to work
> with the FSF on license issues is always to explain how whatever request
> you are making furthers the FSF's goals.

[not being a native english speaker, I had lots of trouble understanding
the last sentence above; apparently, according to my Robert&Collins
english<->french dictionnary applied twice, "to further" means "to
favour" in that context; is that understanding the right one?].

First, I have no idea of who the FSF really means (except RMS). Who
should I contact by email? What should I tell? What do I risk? What are
the *technical* background I can assume? Do FSF people know what coding
is about? (RMS certainly does, but is he most of FSF?).

Second, I believe I tried hard to explain what MELT is doing w.r.t.
documentation in an email (dated May 07th)
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2010-05/msg00125.html to which *nobody*
responded. Or was gcc@ the wrong list to ask?

Are there any reason for which I should expect more attention now? I
don't understand why a question nobody cared about on May 7th should
become interesting on May 27th of the same year (2010).

And all this is not really MELT related, and perhaps even not even GCC
related. Several GNU projects (notably GTK) generates documentation from
code. Not understanding at all any internal (& personal) factors from my
far continent (I am European, and I am not a lawyer!), I cannot imagine
why any "policy" defined for GTK would not be ok for GCC? Or are not all
GNU projects equal? Is GTK less important to the FSF than GCC? Or maybe
GTK is not an FSF project, (this implying that GNU software is not FSF
software)? Or are there still no FSF copyrighted software generating
some small documentation from code! (we are in 2010, and it is common
practice; I could imagine that bash or binutils have similar issues.).
And for GTK at least, the header files only mention LGPL license, and
apparently not any additional exception related to documentation...

And there is one even more basic thing I don't understand. Why are GFDL
& GPL incompatible? Apparently, both allow at least redistribution,
under the same license, of human written textual material -documentation
for GFDL, & source code for GPL- (the GPL probably allows more, like
compilation of a source code & some use of the resultant binary). Why
the probably non-empty intersection of rights (probably the right to
read textual material & to redistribute it verbatim at least) is not
usable?

Also, some official GCC documentation contains substantial chunks of
code (e.g. plugins.texi). Does that mere fact legally invalidate
something?

In practice, should I have to erase all the :doc annotations in MELT
source code? I would be very sad to do that. And even if I did that, I
am not sure to be able to claim that these :doc annotations never
existed (they did). I am not willing to falsely (= lyingly) claim that I
never wrote these :doc annotations. I did wrote them and I don't want to
deny that I did wrote them.

The most important for me is that MELT continues to be a GCC branch. If
I have to reduce or remove the documentation & comments inside the MELT
code for that, I probably would accept that (with great sadness). But
removing explanations -addressed to human readers- from inside source
code is in my naive technical view against the goals of free software.

Cheers.