Re: free vs. non-free debate

[Vladimir Vuksan <vuksan@cs.unm.edu>]

On Tue, 2 Nov 1999, Guylhem Aznar wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 02, 1999 at 01:17:22AM +0100, Hugo.van.der.Kooij@caiw.nl wrote:
> > What happens if someone is offered the ability to get paid for writing
> > free documentation for non-free software? Will you refuse it? Even if this
> 
> I'd like to refuse this document in the LDP.
> 
> > means turning down a good document?
> 
> We can provide links on a "commercial" page to such documents, therefore
> the information will not be lost.
> 
> But it's out of the scope of the LDP. 

Why should we be so exclusive ? I think people should have liberty to
write documentation for whatever they want and if they want to make it
free and it is related to Linux why not ? Of course if someone wrote a
programming guide for Visual C++ LDP would not be a good a place to
include it since Visual C++ is Windows specific. On the other hand if I
want to provide a document that explains how someone might use PHP to
create a reports using Oracle I think this would be more than pertinent to
LDP. Oracle might not be free software but principles and concepts laid
out in the documentation could be helpful in doing work with PHP and for
example Postgres SQL.

I think there should be full disclosure. Sometimes using commercial
software under Linux might be a beneficial thing so why not disclose all
the information possible and let the user compare pros and cons of both
solutions.

Vladimir


--  
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to ldp-discuss-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org