licensing -- will GFDL work?

[Syd Bauman]

On the flight home I read the GFDL in detail. It was so
mind-bogglingly boring I was looking forward to a repeat of the
safety demonstration. But it does look to be a well-crafted legal
tool, and I really hope it gets wide-spread use. However I'm
concerned that it may not be applicable in the clever manner that
David Durand suggested and I so heartily supported. The suggestion
was that we would apply the GFDL to the Guidelines, but earmark
Chapter 28 "Conformance" as an invariant section, thus ensuring that
even if someone takes our Guidelines and makes a modified version of
them, the DTDs that come out of their pizza chef cannot look just
like ours, and documents that claim TEI conformance must conform to
ours, not theirs. (Have I got that right, David?)

The problem is that the GFDL places pretty severe restrictions on
what can be made an invariant section (an invariant section must be a
secondary section -- and a secondary section "contains nothing that
could fall directly within [the document's] overall subject" see
view-source:http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.xml#gfdl-secnd-sect and,
view-source:http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-howto-opt.html#TOC1).

Several possibilities jump to mind, including that I am over-reading
this section, and it's not a problem. To ascertain if this is the
case, I thought that, with Council's permission (i.e., unless someone
objects soon) I would talk to the FSF folks about this. (I am a
paying member of the FSF, and their offices are not too far -- I
don't even think it's a long-distance call for me :-)

Other possibilities include
* finding some other license,
* living with the slim possibility someone would actually take
  advantage of the license and do something we didn't like,
* writing a TEI Free Documentation License.
At first glance the last option seems pretty good -- take the GFDL,
make some minor modifications to allow us to make conformance
invariant, and presto! But in truth, doing it right probably involves
hiring lawyers.