Elliotte Rusty Harold: Free Art? Free Software? Dec 28, 1999, 19 :07 UTC (9 Talkback[s]) (4856 reads) (Other stories by Elliotte Rusty Harold) (As seen on lwn)
"I heard Richard Stallman talk at the recent open source show The Bazaar in New York. He gave his usual stump speech about free vs. open source, how
he got involved in and developed the idea of free software and so forth. One of the newer pieces of his speech was a call for free documentation so
people who update software could simultaneously update the documentation. But what really caught my ear was his simultaneous assertion that he didn't
think novels needed to be open source. As a writer of documentation myself, this got me thinking...."
"Although Stallman didn't state it explicitly, the clear implication was that software documentation doesn't have or need any such artistic protections. I'm
not so sure I agree. Now, as chance would have it at the show I also bought a couple of Stallman's own books, the GNU Emacs Manual and Debugging
with GDB: The GNU Source-Level Debugger. I like Debugging with GDB; I'm not so fond of the GNU Emacs Manual though mostly that's because I'm not so
fond of emacs; but, leaving that aside, if this is what he writes for software documentation, I can see why Stallman wouldn't be upset if someone rewrote
them. Both are very dry, technical explanations of the software. Stallman's own very forceful personality only really comes out in the introductory material
where he discusses the nature of free software. There's not a lot of artistry here; just simple competence and explanation; which is certainly a valid way
to write. I'm not knocking it, but it's far from the only way to write software documentation...."
"Stallman's always been focused on freedom for programmers: freedom to modify code, freedom to distribute the modified code, and so forth; but what
happens to this idea when most software isn't code? And when most of the people producing software aren't programmers? Programming may be an art
but it isn't Art. The licenses that are appropriate for software that's 90% code may not be the same licenses we want or need for software that's 90%+
art."
