Re: Releasing the Emacs guided tour into the public domain; also, video

Phil Sung writes: Great! The license in question is in the preamble of the Texinfo documentation. In the XEmacs distribution, that is in man/xemacs/xemacs.texi. I include a copy below. It's a very simple license, compared to the GPL, but it is not a "template license". It is only usable with the old GNU Emacs manual and derivatives (such as the XEmacs manual), and refers by name to content that is not present in your tutorial. This is messy, and it's not clear to me what it might imply legally. I suggest two options for your consideration: 1. Grant us a single very permissive license, such as the "new BSD" or MIT/X license. These can be "promoted" to any of the licenses we use. 2. Use the "standard" permission notice referring to your preferred license(s), and granting special permission to create certain derivatives. Something like "This Work may be distributed under the GNU FDL, version N or any later version published by the FSF, or the GNU GPL, version M or any later version published by the FSF, at your option. As a special exception, permission is granted to combine this work verbatim or in modified form with any work derived from GNU Emacs or its documentation as distributed by the FSF, and redistribute the result under any copyleft license applicable to that derived work." Be aware that I am not a lawyer. Also, I won't be offended if you say those options are not what you had in mind at all. The unnamed XEmacs documentation license: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. ＠ignore Permission is granted to process this file through Tex and print the results, provided the printed document carries copying permission notice identical to this one except for the removal of this paragraph (this paragraph not being relevant to the printed manual). ＠end ignore Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided also that the sections entitled ``The GNU Manifesto'', ``Distribution'' and ``GNU General Public License'' are included exactly as in the original, and provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one. Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that the sections entitled ``The GNU Manifesto'', ``Distribution'' and ``GNU General Public License'' may be included in a translation approved by the author instead of in the original English. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta