Re: The debate on Invariant sections (long)
RMS said:
>I've looked at the problems people have reported. Many of them are
>misunderstandings (what they believe is not allowed actually is
>allowed), many of these cases have adequate workarounds, and the rest
>are real inconveniences that shouldn't be exaggerated.
OK... but...
>I've explained
>examples of all of these.
Actually, that's where you're wrong. You *haven't* explained examples
of all of these, and some of those explanations you have given have been
found woefully insufficient. (Of course, *you* don't need to do this;
I'm sure you're very busy. Any official representative of the FSF would
do just fine.)
-- I couldn't find a single instance of a 'misunderstanding' explained
by you. In a few cases, you claimed that something was allowed by fair
use, but you were in fact wrong for at least the UK.
-- The only instance of an 'adequate workaround' I saw was a license
incompatibility problem, where you claimed that it was 'always better'
for a manual to be separate from the code and read by the code. Several
people felt that this was not an adequate workaround for the
incompatibility, let alone 'better'.
-- Pretty much everything else you responded to, you said was an
inconvenience being exaggerated, but was not non-free because it was
only a 'packaging restriction'. (An interesting point, certainly.
Although it took a ridiculous amount of time before we managed to get
this statement on why you believed non-removable sections did not render
a document non-free; previously we'd been trying to guess your position,
which doesn't usually work.) Several people tried to open a debate
about the issue of when a restriction is a packaging restriction and
when it's a fundamental restriction, since they disagreed. You refused
to discuss this.
>The only real problems seem to come from incompatibility of licenses.
I'm glad you recognize those problems. :-) Happiness! Now, does the
FSF have plans to do anything about them? If so, great! If not, why not?
--Nathanael
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