Re: Permission to use portions of the recent GNU Emacs Manual

Hi, Richard and Ben, On Fri, 10 Dec 2004, Richard Stallman wrote: There is irony in that sentence. I'm speaking as somebody who's put a significant amount of time into amending the Emacs manual (e.g. programs.texi). I did so under the impression that what I was amending was free, in the same sense that the Emacs Lisp that I contribute is free. Some time later, my attention was drawn to the details of the GFDL. Anybody wishing to use the contents of a GFD is obliged to copy the cover sheets of the original. This restriction seems analogous to one that, say, allows functions to be used for decoding a compressed graphic but not for encoding one. What is the purpose of the GFDL? I quote from the licence: "The purpose of this License is to make a manual .... "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially." Since the XEmacs team's freedom here is ineffective, the GFDL is, on its own terms, broken. I do not understand why the GFDL exists at all. It seems to me that the GPL is as adequate for manuals as it is for code. I also don't understand why the Emacs Manual's licence had to be changed - a prime effect of this change was to annul people's freedom to combine old bits of the manual with new bits. My feeling is that this is just not the way things should be in the free software community. Put bluntly, having made contributions to the Emacs manual, I feel duped. Yes, the GFDL conforms to the terms of the assignment papers I signed, but I don't think I should have to wave the small print past a lawyer before signing this sort of thing. Do I really want to make any more contributions to the Emacs manual? That's not just a rhetorical question. Richard, the GFDL is broken. Please get it fixed, in a way which will restore the XEmacs team's freedom to copy and modify the Emacs manual. -- Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)