Can you direct
me to a specific url where I can learn more about why
RMS believes that Invariant Sections are an absolute necessity?
I'm relying mostly on discussions in the Debian legal list,
(thanks, I'm still reading all this)
The best evidence that he won't budge
is that this argument with certain principal Debian players
has been going on a long time, and they really want the FDL to change.
Throughout the long debates, RMS hasn't budged an inch.
That's why I don't think that we would do any better.
Or perhaps we can offer a way out of this mess to all parties,
based on this:
In
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200305/msg00582.html
RMS wrote,
Incompatibility of licenses is a significant practical
inconvenience,
and we have sometimes made changes for the sake of compatibility, but
mere inconvenience doesn't make a license non-free.
As far as I'm concerned *our* beef with the GNU FDL is not about
invariant sections per se, but about license incompatibility. We'd
like for people to be able to cut and paste text back and forth with
relative easy from documents under GNU FDL and CC Attribution-Share
Alike.
Our other complaint is about the *complexity* of the license, which is
long and tedious and clearly written from a perspective of a 'manual'
or 'documentation'. Elsewhere, Stallman points out that the invariant
section 'problem' wouldn't resolve the 'length of license' problem,
since it's 8 pages, and the invariant section stuff is a lot shorter.
What might work out for everyone would be the creation of an 'LFDL',
for "Lesser FDL", similar in spirit and motivation to the "LGPL".
And
Stallman can recommend that people not use it, while simulteneously
acknowledging that it can be useful in some contexts.
I think a big selling point is that while free software is now
well-established and not a radical concept, free texts like Wikipedia
are still relatively new and unheard of, outside of free software
documentation, and that this budding movement has different needs that
need to be addressed if the idea of freedom is to grow in this arena.
In code, cutting and pasting and creating a derivative work out of the
middle of one program into the middle of another program isn't often
very useful. Each program has it's own variable names, structure,
requirements. Code re-use is possible, but is usually accomplished
with dynamic or static linking.
In our case, the case of text, that kind of cutting and pasting is
central to what we do. A person writing an article about Iraq may
wish to very quickly and effectively adapt a CC BY-SA licensed work
by adding a few paragraphs of lightly edited Wikipedia background
information.
So license incompatibility is a growing problem for us.
Of course, we're not so much asking for the
Invariant Sections to go
as we are asking for the GNU FDL to allow relicensing under CC
BY-SA. But CC BY-SA doesn't recognise Invariant Sections, so that
would allow the Invariant Sections to be removed in two steps. RMS
would see that in a second, as I'm sure you'll agree!
Yes, but there's a solution to that, at least I think so.
Anything released under FDL 1.x or 2.0 with no invariant sections, no
Front-Cover texts, and no Back-Cover texts can be distributed under
the terms of LFDL 2.0 *or* FDL 2.0. Anything release under FDL 1.x
with invariant sections can be released under FDL 2.0.
And then LFDL can be simpler and worded carefully so as to maximize
compatibility with CC SA.
A similar change would need to be made to CC SA 2.0, so that it would
allow for relicensing under LFDL.
--Jimbo