Talk:The Art of Unix Programming

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In the spirit of the open source community, the author has made the book freely available online.

The spirit of the open source community is about collaborative development - ESR released this book under a license which prohibits modification. The term "open source" was invented to dispell the confusion between "free speech" and "free beer". Free Software and Open Source software are supposed to be free as in "free speech". ESR made this book available for free as in "free beer" - which is not what Open Source is about. He also violated his own rule of development by writing this book in a Cathederal style.

If someone would care to add a critique of the imaginary history that ESR has woven into this book, that'd be good. (I've done enough ESR exposing for one day.) Sometimes I think ESR edits these pages himself.Markvs 21:34, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

And the FSF doesn't allow modification of the text of the GPL, nor Richard Stallman of his philosophy essays. "Copyright (C) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111, USA Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved." - David Gerard 22:05, May 11, 2004 (UTC)

FSF allows modification of their technical documentation. Philosophical stuff misrepresent the author if it was modified - technical stuff will misrepresent the subject matter if it is not modifiable. Software changes, the manuals need to be updated, or they'll be wrong. Documentation bugs can be found by anyone familiar with the software, and they should be allowed to fix them. Philosophical bugs cannot be judged by anyone but the author, so modification is not necessary. If the GPL was modifiable, legal uncertaintly would be created (which "GPL" is this software under?), and more incompatible derivative licenses would be created by companies that want to claim to be using "the GPL". (I won't defend the GNU Free Documentation License, I think it's a bad license, but if ESR wanted to claim that this book contained philosophical bits - which it does - the GFDL would have allowed him to mark them as "Invariant Sections", and the technical bits could have been modifiable.)

I think it's noteworthy that in the making of this book, ESR has ignored the two rules that he tells everyone else to follow (OpenSource + Bazaar), but if you think this should be omitted, I won't put it back. My wording was a bit weird, maybe "It's worth noting that this book is not Open Source." would've been better.Markvs 22:43, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

Look at the name of the book. "The Art Of". It's not technical documentation or a work like Stallman's biography - it's blowharding philosophy. I really don't see why it's at all remarkable that it's under something close to a "reproduce verbatim" license - David Gerard 23:05, May 11, 2004 (UTC)