In this letter, I will answer some specific technical questions about the license to the best of my ability. But in a separate letter I will answer the bigger picture question, and convince Simon that the attribution requirement is a good thing.
Simon Kissane wrote:
I don't like that idea, and having read the GNU FDL, have come to the conclusion that the requirement is most likely in violation of the terms of the license.
Most certainly not. I asked RMS specifically about this issue before we adopted the GNU FDL for Nupedia and Wikipedia.
The rule is that the invariant section can contain anything as long as it is not the subject matter of the article. In particular, the invariant section can contain HTML code for linking back to the article.
The FDL permits the inclusion of invariant sections, but it makes clear that these are front cover sections or appendices, i.e. separate sections at the beginning or end of a work, not something to be included on every page.
Each individual article in Wikipedia is released under the FDL. They are completely separable by potential users.
It also implies that each of these sections is to have a unique title -- are we to give each link table a unique name? It also implies clearly that the invariant sections are in the original copy of the document -- which the table links aren't in the original copy (www.wikipedia.com).
This is obviously a minor technical issue which can be fixed in 5 seconds.
Finally, requiring them to be in HTML seems to be violative of the FDL as well. What if I wanted to do my website in some other markup language, such as XHTML or SGML or XML or WML or (insert some not yet invented language here) instead? Then I can't technically include the exact HTML, which seems to amount to a requirement that any redistribution on a website be in HTML. Additional restrictions over and above those in the FDL are prohibited by the FDL.
But additional *permissions* are not prohibited. What we do is require the HTML if you are publishing in *any* medium, but give you an extra *permission* to render it INSTEAD as plain text, XML, SGML, or whatever is appropriate in a particular medium.
There is no violation of the license to require that the invariant section be rendered exactly, no matter what the contents.
Now of course, any of these terms could be added if some one individual owned the content to Wikipedia, but they don't. The contributors license it everyone else under the terms of the FDL; attempting to redistribute it under any additional restriction contrary to the FDL is in violation of their copyright, unless you get their consent, which would mean the consent of every single contributor to Wikipedia.
This is a deep misunderstanding. Any redistributor can add invariant sections. We add ours. You are free to distribute your own writings without the invariant sections if you like.
I understand that all people want to do is require acknowledgement, all I am saying is that legal means must be chosen to carry this out. The legal means are those permitted by the FDL, which is by placing a statement (and a URL) as front-cover matter, back-cover matter, or in an invariant section. Websites copying Wikipedia are required to include these sections, but these are separate sections, not notices on every single page.
They are separate sections, on every single page.