This one time, at band camp, Thomas Bushnell BSG said: > Anton Zinoviev <anton@lml.bas.bg> writes: > > > The modifications that are permited by GFDL are enough to make useful > > modifications, that is to adapt the document and to improve it. Yes, > > you can not do whatever you whish but this is not necessarily the > > right interpretation of DFSG. > > For many purposes it is quite useful to be able to remove invariant > sections. This has been pointed out to RMS, and on debian-legal, a > bazillion times. I will recite one such case: > > If I want to reproduce only one small part of a GFDLd manual which has > invariant sections, then I can only do so if I reproduce all the > invariant sections, which can be quite large, in comparison to the few > paragraphs I wish to copy from the text. Small amounts are likely covered under fair use. If you want to reproduce large amounts of the text, you will have to provide the invariant sections as well. But under someone's recent interpretation, printed matter should be considered object code, so this means a GPL'ed document that you wanted to distribute to your students would have the usual GPL restrictions WRT to source availability (i.e., hand out a CD full of source to each student or agree to make the source code available for 3 years. Note that this second one is something even an organization as large as Debian hasn't been able to do before you call it reasonable). I don't see these two restrictions as substantially different. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- | ,''`. Stephen Gran | | : :' : sgran@debian.org | | `. `' Debian user, admin, and developer | | `- http://www.debian.org | -----------------------------------------------------------------
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