Glenn Maynard wrote:
On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 10:04:55AM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:Olive wrote:The preamble of the GPL is totally similar to an invariant section: it express political opnion (and nothing or few about the licence itself) and cannot be changed nor removed. [...]The preamble of the GPL can be removed in some situations, with similar conditions to DFSG 4 IMO. Please see the GPL FAQ at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOmitPreamble http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPLThe preamble can be removed, but not from other people's works; when the GPL is attached to a work, the preamble is a full-blown invariant section.
But that is exactly the point. The preamble of the GPL, attached to a work, express political opinion about free software in general (and very few about what you can do with the software) and you cannot distribute a GPL work by omitting this.
The presence of an invariant section, which do not concern technical aspect of the document, does not prevent you to modify "the software", understood that the equivalent of "the software" in a document is the technical aspect of the document.
The same is true for the old BSD licence (free by the DFG n10): you cannot remove nor modified the advertising clause. An invariant section is nothing more than an "advertising clause". I agree that the FSF is not coherent in the sense that they discourage this advertising close and that they encourage essentially the same thing in their FDL lisence; but everybody (including the FSF) have always declared this advertising close to be free.
There are moreover a lot of trademark and logos in Debian (the mozilla trademark for exemple) that you cannot modified (but you can however remove them) and this does not make the software free.
Almost all comments that I read, let believe that we can make anything we like invariant, but it is actually not true at all.
(please excuse my English, I am not a native speaker) Olive