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 pages
of additional invariant material.
The GPL didn't print out to 6 pages last time I checked, but maybe I'm wron
That is still bigger than the
reference card. Do you object to the GPL on these grounds?
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).
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.
