> 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.
No, you've missed the point. There is *no* license which is free-for-software which would allow the use of such a manual section in isolation. None. Because, of course, the FSF's definition of free, as applied to software, doesn't allow invariant sections. That's both inaccurate (since it does, in some ways, allow them) and irrelevant (because we don't apply our definition of free software to manuals, and Debian may not apply it to anything), but in addition, this problem doesn't really depend on invariant sections at all. The same would be true for a GPL-covered manual, because you can't use snippets without a copy of the GPL (unless they are fair use). However, the point is that the simple license, was always compatible with at least one free software license. For example, one could easily distribute software under the simple license itself. I don't think anyone ever did so. In practice, the issue is not significant, since you can distribute the manual along with the software, and make the software access the manual in whichever way you want.