Can you direct me to a specific url where I can learn more about why RMS believes that Invariant Sections are an absolute necessity?
I'm relying mostly on discussions in the Debian legal list,
(thanks, I'm still reading all this)
The best evidence that he won't budge is that this argument with certain principal Debian players has been going on a long time, and they really want the FDL to change. Throughout the long debates, RMS hasn't budged an inch. That's why I don't think that we would do any better.
Or perhaps we can offer a way out of this mess to all parties, based on this:
In http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200305/msg00582.html RMS wrote,
Incompatibility of licenses is a significant practical inconvenience, and we have sometimes made changes for the sake of compatibility, but mere inconvenience doesn't make a license non-free.
As far as I'm concerned *our* beef with the GNU FDL is not about invariant sections per se, but about license incompatibility. We'd like for people to be able to cut and paste text back and forth with relative easy from documents under GNU FDL and CC Attribution-Share Alike.
Our other complaint is about the *complexity* of the license, which is long and tedious and clearly written from a perspective of a 'manual' or 'documentation'. Elsewhere, Stallman points out that the invariant section 'problem' wouldn't resolve the 'length of license' problem, since it's 8 pages, and the invariant section stuff is a lot shorter.
What might work out for everyone would be the creation of an 'LFDL', for "Lesser FDL", similar in spirit and motivation to the "LGPL". And Stallman can recommend that people not use it, while simulteneously acknowledging that it can be useful in some contexts.
I think a big selling point is that while free software is now well-established and not a radical concept, free texts like Wikipedia are still relatively new and unheard of, outside of free software documentation, and that this budding movement has different needs that need to be addressed if the idea of freedom is to grow in this arena.
In code, cutting and pasting and creating a derivative work out of the middle of one program into the middle of another program isn't often very useful. Each program has it's own variable names, structure, requirements. Code re-use is possible, but is usually accomplished with dynamic or static linking.
In our case, the case of text, that kind of cutting and pasting is central to what we do. A person writing an article about Iraq may wish to very quickly and effectively adapt a CC BY-SA licensed work by adding a few paragraphs of lightly edited Wikipedia background information.
So license incompatibility is a growing problem for us.
Of course, we're not so much asking for the Invariant Sections to go as we are asking for the GNU FDL to allow relicensing under CC BY-SA. But CC BY-SA doesn't recognise Invariant Sections, so that would allow the Invariant Sections to be removed in two steps. RMS would see that in a second, as I'm sure you'll agree!
Yes, but there's a solution to that, at least I think so.
Anything released under FDL 1.x or 2.0 with no invariant sections, no Front-Cover texts, and no Back-Cover texts can be distributed under the terms of LFDL 2.0 *or* FDL 2.0. Anything release under FDL 1.x with invariant sections can be released under FDL 2.0.
And then LFDL can be simpler and worded carefully so as to maximize compatibility with CC SA.
A similar change would need to be made to CC SA 2.0, so that it would allow for relicensing under LFDL.
--Jimbo