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[Delirium]

David Gerard wrote:
>> Talking to the FSF is the only realistic option.
>>     
>
>
> RMS's famous intransigence is his most admirable characteristic and
> also his most bloody annoying. I keep finding he's right about things
> he said five or ten years ago that were considered silly at the time,
> so I'm sure his wisdom with refusing to move the GFDL an inch toward
> CC-by-sa compatibility is well thought out.
>   

Well, the FSF is in a delicate position with these sorts of things.  
Licensing something under "... or any later version published by the 
FSF" is a very unusual sort of thing to do---you're giving the FSF the 
authority to unilaterally relicense your stuff.  People only do it 
because they trust the FSF to uphold the meaning of the licenses, and 
only change them to amend technical errors, close unforseen loopholes, 
and so on.  If people were worried that the FSF would make more 
substantive changes to the license that they might disagree with, then 
they'd start licensing things under a specific version.  That would 
limit flexibility, since then not even the FSF could fix any situations 
that arose.

So from both an ethical and practical perspective, the FSF has a strong 
need to keep new license versions as close to old ones as possible, and 
so is naturally quite conservative with its changes.

That said, I do hope the new version makes some significant practical 
improvements while maintaining the spirit and general mechanisms of the 
current one.

-Mark