> A long message at startup would be very inconvenient, simply for being > long, regardless of its meaning. A section of the same length in a > manual would not cause any such inconvenience. Nobody is "heavily > affected" by a few extra pages in a large manual.
This is not true. Such an addition to the manual prevents taking small snippets of the manual and using them in isolation. The term "heavily affected" is still an exaggeration. In any case, the effect is simply due to incompatibility. I posted a long message explaining that this sort of thing is a consequence of the existence of incompatible free licenses. The situation is the same with the simple license we used in the past for manuals with no invariant sections. Yet nobody is saying that that license is non-free. It looks like a double standard is being applied.