Re: Social Contract GR's Affect on sarge
On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 09:46:53AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Which leads us to a dilemma: the longer the GFDL remain
> unchallenged, the more entrenched it gets. There is also evidence
> that people are using invariant sections in a manner not envisaged by
> the authors of the GFDL: Ralf Hildebrandt's postfix page used to
> have this license statement: `
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms
> of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version
> published by the Free Software Foundation; with the Invariant Sections being
> THE WHOLE DOCUMENT (each section is invariant). No Front- or Back-Cover Texts
> are provided. '
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
That's simply inconsistent with the text of the GFDL, and I'd guess it
probably renders it undistributable (but IANAL). Invariant Sections must
be Secondary, so unless the entire document falls outside its own
overall subject the whole document cannot be Invariant. (I guess you
know this, but just to spell it out ...)
Rendering one's own work undistributable by failing to make it possible
for people other than the copyright holder to comply with the
restrictions in the licence is not a problem new to the GFDL. It's been
done with the GPL, and no doubt will happen with future licences, both
free and non-free.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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