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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss,comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: The Official Word on Citations in FSF Works
Message-ID: <3014@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 17 Jul 90 17:59:51 GMT
References: <9886@odin.corp.sgi.com> <1990Jul3.111026.19698@twinsun.com>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 40

In article <1990Jul3.111026.19698@twinsun.com> eggert@dew.twinsun.com (Paul Eggert) writes:
>
> But to refuse to cite a book purely for political reasons smacks of
> censorship, and in the long run a reputation for censorship will hurt
> the FSF far more than a few impure references to non-free works.  The
> FSF should be sensitive to the traditions of scholarly publication,
> because they are natural and powerful allies of the FSF's goals.

Note that you have to say "smacks of censorship", because it isn't
in fact censorship.  Moreover, "political reasons" aren't necessarily
reprehensible.  You have to address whether the particular political
reasons are acceptable in this particular case.

Now, if the FSF really has violated the accepted standards of citation
just because they don't want to even mention non-free works, then I agree
they've done themselves more harm than good.

However, authors are under no obligation to mention other works which
cover the same or similar material -- only works they have actually
used.  It is not necessary to follow the conventions of academic
documents (papers, theses, and the like), where part of the game is
to find related work, trace ideas to their source, etc.  Note too
that the inventors of AWK are given credit; it is just a particular
book that is not mentioned.  I don't think anyone has shown that
that book was plagiarized or used in any way in the preparation of
the GAWK manual.

Of course, some people may still feel that standards of politeness,
at least, have been violated; and others may feel that something more
like the academic conventions should have been followed.  And if
enough people who would otherwise be support the FSF are turned off,
the failure to cite the AWK book may prove to have been a mistake.

However, we should also bear in mind that there are a number of
people out there who, for various reasons, already oppose the FSF
and are opportunistically looking for ways to argue that the FSF
is inconsistent or otherwise wrong.  These people won't be satisfied
no matter what books are cited in the GAWK manual.

-- JD