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Appropriate purposes of invariant sectionsAppropriate purposes of invariant sectionsPosted May 1, 2003 20:58 UTC (Thu) by piman (subscriber, #8957)In reply to: Appropriate purposes of invariant sections by copsewood Parent article: When "Free" Isn't Good Enough
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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