[Textbook-l] different open content licenses

[Daniel Mayer]

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)