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Appropriate purposes of invariant sectionsAppropriate purposes of invariant sectionsPosted May 1, 2003 19:58 UTC (Thu) by copsewood (subscriber, #199)Parent article: When "Free" Isn't Good Enough The GFDL allowance of invariant sections recognises the secondary and primary purposes of free documentation: secondarily to assert origins and opinions, but primarily to enable documentation of a changing code-base to be kept up to date. It is widely considered abusive to misrepresent the origins of a work (plaigiarism) and offensive to misrepresent the opinions contained within a work attributed to a particular author. The allowance of invariant sections simply reflects the publishing and academic reality required to prevent such abuse in respect of the secondary purposes of a free software document. The intention of allowing variant and invariant sections is therefore to distinguish the parts of a work which must not be so abused, from the parts which need to be updated to reflect the technical nature of the software more accurately. If there is a freedom issue here, in connection with a free operating system distribution which respects the principle of freedom, this might better accept or reject such documentation on quality grounds. Inappropriate choice of variant and invariant sections within a document by its originators should be addressed with these authors on grounds of quality control, as it is not the _primary_ purpose of free software documentation to carry the opinions of its originators or charitable appeals, but preventing such possibilities will remove one of the incentives which result in free software being written.
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Appropriate purposes of invariant sections Posted May 1, 2003 20:58 UTC (Thu) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link] This could be the case if invariant sections had to be, e.g. removed if the document is changed. This is not the case. They cannot be removed, and they cannot be changed, even if the rest of the document is. One example Debian uses is that some GNU manuals contains an invariant section "Why you should use the GFDL". Debian could add an invariant section right after it "Why you should not use the GFDL". No one could remove either one (although people getting it from GNU, rather than Debian, would only see the first one - unless Debian's maintains started submitting patches to GNU, like they often do, but with the invariant section attached). One of my key complaints is that invariant sections are unremovable (see all the comments on the debian-legal mailing list over the past year or so). This creates tons of practical problems (including all invarant sections on a reference card derived from the documentation? Impossible), as well as ideological problems (such as the above case). If they were removable, we could just remove the invariant sections and the resulting document would be unquestionably free - although possibly not entirely as useful. This is ignoring the odd problems about "opaque" and "transparent" copies, or the problems of the GFDL being GPL-incompatible, or the fact the GFDL in fact exhibits the exact same problem the FSF says the BSD license has. The "invariant sections protect the author's integrity" argument has been discussed extensively on debian-legal, and IMO, thoroughly debunked.
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