Toby wrote:
But anybody can add Invariant Sections. So if GNU FDL with Invariant Sections is not free, then GNU FDL without them is not copyleft.
Well the Debian people want to consider the GNU FDL non-copyleft - that is their right. But they do not own the term. Anyway...
The Invariant Sections issue is very troublesome to me and we really need to work with the GNU people to remove this option from future versions of their license (for the sake of free content we must do this because it is not possible to change Wikipedia's license). I would furthermore /strongly/ argue that we do not accept any GNU FDL text in any Wikimedia project that has Invariant Sections. The last thing we need is to become infected with that garbage.
The Creative Commons SA licence, in contrast, has no such problems. It is by any objective measure the superior licence;
I tend to agree but in the real world the GNU FDL is the license used by the great majority of free content (not just Wikipedia ; CC is a suite of licenses, not a single license, but together they are gaining some ground). So our strategy should be to go with the flow and try to change that license instead of making things really complicated by having a bunch of different licenses within one project.
I'm sure RMS will listen to our concerns since Wikipedia is by far the largest GNU FDL project in the world and I'm sure RMS is also concerned about Debian's decision. The whole point of the GNU FDL was to have a license for software documentation and yet anybody who wants their documentation in Debian won't use this license - hence the license needs to be overhauled.
But in the meantime it is already difficult enough to get people to understand our one license - let's not add another and make it even more complicated.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)