On Sun, 2006-02-12 at 04:44 +0100, Frank Heckenbach wrote:
- He adds invariant sections that strongly disagree with many central items of the GNU philosophy (such as advocating "open source", disparaging copyleft, misrepresenting the history of free software and the important of the GNU project, or to be really evil perhaps advocating software patents and DRM -- you know, all the stuff we don't like to see, yet see all too often).
Here it comes the very good provision many European Copyright laws have, and that US does not have unfortunately, which are the "rights of the author" (droit d'autor, diritti d'autore). In most Europe (I think at least Italy, Germany and France), the author can't in any way dispossess himself of these rights and they permit the author to stop a distribution of his work (or a derived one) if that work damages his image or twist so much it's production to go against the principles that inspired it.
Anyway, I must thank you because this proof of concept finally convinced me that the GFDL has really serious problems, and that persistent invariant sections can indeed be more harmful than helpful.
The FSF will have to undergo a careful evaluation of these problems, I hope they will do so soon after the GPLv3 process will be completed.
Simo.