Hello Rafael,
Rafael Sadowski wrote on Mon, Mar 31, 2025 at 06:52:42AM +0200:
> On Sun Mar 30, 2025 at 09:51:19AM +0200, Theo Buehler wrote:
>> On Sun, Mar 30, 2025 at 09:45:46AM +0200, Rafael Sadowski wrote:
>>> I don't see the point for this. OK to remove?
>> This was done because the license requires
>>
>> * 2. If this software is redistributed in a modified condition
>> * it must reveal clearly that it has been modified.
> Thanks! Now I see the point and it makes perfect sense.
>> Is this still clearly revealed if you remove MESSAGE?
> No, let's leave it as it is. Sorry for the noise.
You might consider saying something like the following, though:
The festival lite package was modified from the original source,
and the license explicitly requires saying so.
You can find the modifications specific to OpenBSD on
...
That would have two advantages:
1. From the user perspective:
Conciseness is among the goals of documentation,
and MESSAGE counts as documentation.
Providing useless or blatantly obvious information in documentation
is detrimental because it makes the documentation longer.
Providing useless or blatantly obvious information without saying
why that information is provided is even worse because on top of
wasting time for reading, it makes the user wonder what the point
is and whether they are missing some important, non-obvious point,
whether there is some kind a trap somewhere they need to discover.
So as it stand, in addition to waste, it's spreading FUD.
2. From the developer perspective:
We just witnessed how this idiotic license confuses even seasoned
developers - arguably, developers can find out from the CVS log,
but when something is done for unusual or idiotic reasons,
we usually want a comment in the isource code to help developers
rather than relying on the (ever growing) changelog.
In case you wonder why i call this requirement in the license idiotic:
it is my opinion that the permission to redistribute modified versions
is *the* essential characteristic of Free Software. On top of that,
porting is almost universally required to run any software, so there
is no meaningful difference whatsoever between an "unmodified" and
a "modified" version. At best, there is a continuum of "a bit more"
or "a bit less" modified.
Yours,
Ingo
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