Re: A possible GFDL compromise

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

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     > Another form of tangent is citing practical inconveniences, often
>     > shared with many other accepted free licenses, as if they were
>     > reasons to consider a license non-free.
> 
>     This is incorrect.  Practical inconveniences are precisely the point
>     in deciding whether a restriction is insignificant or not.
> 
> It takes more than just inconvenience to make a license non-free.  In
> effect, you are chosing to ignore the distinction.  If so, it is
> natural your conclusions will disagree greatly with the GNU Project's
> conclusions.

Please don't tell me whether I am "in effect" choosing to ignore
something.  Perhaps I have give it inadequate attention.

I gave a particular argument, which is that an insignificant
restriction does not impinge freedom, and that a practical
inconvenience is one important way of knowing that a particular
restriction is significant.

It must still be the kind of restriction that impinges freedom.  In
other words, I'm saying that freedom-impinging-restrictions get a free
pass, provided they are insignificant.  If a restriction is a real
practical inconvenience, then it isn't insignificant, and so it isn't
entitled to the free pass.

Whether it is the kind of restriction that impinges freedom is best
measured against the four freedoms, including, of course, the freedom
to modify.  That is a freedom, and the whole question here is whether
it is right to deny people that freedom for documentation.

Saying "you can modify the documentation, just not the invariant
sections" isn't enough, incidentally, to answer this, because the
attachment of the invariant section to the documentation *is* a
property of the documentation.  (Consider if there were such a thing
on a piece of software: you can modify all these functions, but not
that one.  The result is that the whole thing is nonfree.)

So I think it is clearly and unequivocably clear that nonvariant
sections are an impingement on freedom to modify and copy.  The
question is: should we be bothered by this impingement?  I think the
fact that the impingement is a disaster for a jillion practical cases
is one very important reason we should be bothered.

Now if you are just insisting, as Bradley Kuhn did, that a copyright
owner has the right to attach whatever restrictions he wants, whether
others are bothered or not, then you are right--but that doesn't make
the restrictions *good*.

Thomas