On 08-Feb-2008, David Gerard wrote:
GFDL is free by all measures if you don't use invariant sections and so forth, isn't it? Does anyone dispute that?
Unmodifiable sections (not merely those the license calls "Invariant Sections") are only the most prominent of the problematic issues of the FDL. Even if a specific work does not exercise those parts of the license, the other problems remain.
"Draft Debian Position Statement about the GNU Free Documentation License" Not ratified, but does cover many of the problems with the freedom of works under the FDL. URL:http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml
"A Simple Guide to the Problems of the GNU FDL" URL:http://mjr.towers.org.uk/blog/2006/fdl
Many of the remaining problems have to do with the license attempting to have "documentation" distinct from "program", even though there are many works that are clearly both (e.g. Postscript documents).
It's unfortunate that some within the FSF choose to interpret "software" as equivalent to "program", instead of the more tenable position that "software" is a term as opposed to "hardware". This leads to the even worse position that documentation recipients deserve freedoms different from the freedoms deserved by recipients of programs.