RE: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual
The people who consider these issues for Debian have arrived
at an extremely strict and mechanical way of interpreting
their criteria, which I think is very mistaken.
The FSF made this decision years ago, and it is not an open
question now. Could you please move the discussion to
gnu-misc-discuss(a)gnu.org?
This is COMPLETELY relevant to this list, because the bottom issue is
[a] XEmacs forked and kept the identical license
[b] 3 or 4 years ago -- i.e. 9-10 years after the XEmacs fork -- you changed
the license in a way that it cross-incompatible.
[c] I made a simple request -- will you cross-license the manual for us?
[d] you said no.
This is totally relevant to GNU Emacs.
Richard, please reconsider. You have a reputation of antipathy towards
XEmacs. If you're at all interested in mending fences a little, this would
be a very easy step -- simply declare that we are allowed to use the code
under our license (which was your license up through 2000 or so). Otherwise
you give the impression of actively hindering the XEmacs project.
ben