Richard Stallman wrote:
Remember the hypothetical "emacs reference card", which must be accompanied by 12 pages of additional invariant material? Sounds like a big deal to me.If the GPL were used, it would have to be accompanied by 6 pagesof additional invariant material.
The GPL didn't print out to 6 pages last time I checked, but maybe I'm wron
It's annoying but it can be dealt with. The distinction I, personally, was trying to make is that that's a finite, known, limited amount. You didn't respond to the point that the amount for the GFDL is not a maximum amount at all, just a current amount. That and several other differences are enumerated below (all to the detriment of the GFDL).That is still bigger than the reference card. Do you object to the GPL on these grounds?
The GFDL allows arbitrarily large amounts of invariant text. Do you agree that, say, 1000 pages of invariant text would be non-free? How about 10,000? 1,000,000? (If you do, at least we're getting somewhere closer to understanding one another.)
With the GFDL'ed reference card, since the "Invariant Section" text is the majority of the text, I'd be doubtful that it could qualify as "Secondary" at all: it may be the main topic by sheer volume. So it may not even be distributable. No such problem with the GPL.
Further "Invariant Section" problem: I can't use parts of the GCC manual in an essay on the funding of free software (probably as historical examples), because I must retain the Invariant Section, but it is no longer "secondary". (In some countries this *may* be permitted by fair use, but it's very dicey to rely on that in this day and age.) In contrast, I can use any part of the GCC program code (and comments) for this purpose, just by putting my essay under the GPL.
The GFDL with Invariant Sections allows reuse for the narrow purpose of improving the same manual, but effectively prohibits practical reuse for many other purposes. We've come up with dozens of examples. So far your only response to most of them has been "That's not important". FYI, that's not going to convince anyone.