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Re: The debate on Invariant sections (long)



    Not consistently.  The GNU FDL is a licensing initiative that is
    apparently intended to be used for all FSF documentation.  The
    traditional GNU documentation license did not always include Invariant
    Sections.

In the past, some of our manuals included invariant sections and some
did not.  Today that is still the case.  However, in the past we
needed an ad hoc license to have invariant sections.  What changed
with the GFDL is that it is a single license that covers both cases.

    You did not offer very specific rebuttals to any Debian forum of which
    I'm aware.[2]

Arguing with you is not useful.  You make many pedantic attacks about
minor points.  See above for one example; here's a second, from the
same message:

    [RMS said:]
	    We want to encourage widespread use of the FDL for two reasons:

	    1. It leads to a pool of text that can be copied between manuals.

	    2. It is (or at least ought to be) good for helping commercial
	    publishers succeed publishing free manuals.

    I do not understand how the traditional GNU documentation license,
    without their proto-invariant sections, does not achieve either of the
    above goals.

Those are our goals for wanting the GNU FDL to be widely used, but
those are not our only goals in choosing licenses for our manuals.

I could respond to all of these pedantic attacks, but it isn't useful.
You can always make more of them.  You have more time for this than I
do.  So I decided to spend my time on other things.


You raised one point that I am concerned about:

    * Debugging with GDB; "GDB version 5  May 2000"[1]
    [1] This manual is an interesting case because it started out with no
	invariant sections at all, but later adopted the GNU FDL and marked
	non-Secondary Sections as Invariant[3], which RMS said was "not
	permitted"[4].

I will investigate this, and if a non-Secondary section has indeed
been marked as invariant, I will make sure that is corrected.




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