Re: REVISED PROPOSAL regarding DFSG 3 and 4, licenses, and modifiable text

[tb@becket.net (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)]

Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> writes:

> On Sun, Dec 02, 2001 at 12:22:10PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> > Except right now we have in fact the rule that each person decides for
> > himself what is reasonable in this regard, and, in fact, we *DON'T*
> > have a lot of invariant text in main!
> 
> The GNU FDL and OPL are new licenses relative to the BSD, Artistic, and
> GNU GPL.  It is perfectly consistent to expect these new licenses to be
> used more widely in the future.  It is not reasonable to expect them to
> have been used before they were written.

However, even under the existing licenses there are lots of invariant
sections.  So what exactly is the point?  You seem to be fearing that
the GFDL will encourage people to write lots of new invariant
sections, as if they couldn't already do that, with perfectly good
models about how to license it in the GCC and Emacs manuals.  The
availability of the GFDL changes none of that.