Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual
Karl Fogel <kfogel(a)floss.red-bean.com> writes:
Stefan Monnier <monnier(a)iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
> I don't see any benefit from using the GFDL over the GPL that would justify
> the downside of preventing the XEmacs people from using our documentation.
> [ Unless we consider that as an upside, but I really don't see any good
> reason why we should be so antagonizing. ] Similarly, the licensing problems
> it can cause when extracting docs and doc-skeletons out of code
> is worrisome.
I agree.
It is bad that our docs are license-incompatible with XEmacs's GPL'd
docs.
It's bad for the XEmacs developers and other Emacs forks, irrelevant
for us, since only FSF copyright assigned contributions are accepted
into Emacs and its manual, anyway, and the copyright holder is free to
move stuff between licences within the scope of the assignment
contracts.
It is also confusing how the GFDL interacts with extracted docs from
non-GFDL code, as you point out.
Again, this is not a problem for Emacs development itself (the
copyright all being by the FSF), but for every fork of it.
Which makes it appear to me as jibing with the idea of a Public
Licence. As explained elsewhere, I do think the GFDL a good idea, but
I don't like the implications of using it tightly coupled with GPLed
software development.
--
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum