Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual
Matthew Mundell <matt(a)mundell.ukfsn.org> writes:
Stefan Monnier <monnier(a)iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
> But I think that this "freedom" argument is flawed. "Freedom"
> means something different to everyone, so it's not a very good way
> to convince other people. Especially in the context of the Free
> Software movement, I understand "free" to apply to the program
> itself, not its user: the program (or the doc) itself is "free",
> can't be harnessed/hijacked by anyone. It quite directly implies
> that people aren't "free" to use it as they please.
That sounds more like the program is being protected than freed.
Certainly. This protection is the whole point of copyleft licences as
compared to licences like the MIT X11 licence or placing something in
the public domain.
This is not an issue: the various GNU licences never were aiming for
the "most free in every sense of the word" award in the first place.
--
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum