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

There's been much contrasting of the GFDL w/ the GPL, or the GFDL with a "Creative Commons license with commercial restriction". I've never meant to suggest either of those, but rather licenses similar to the Creative Commons Plain Attribution or ShareAlike. Yes, I understand. Unfortunately, you are not the one choosing the license to apply. I have seen items that ought to be free put under a "Creative Commons license with commercial restriction". We do not need to convince anyone who is already using a free license. They are not harming us or others. (Note: I'm not advocating using an actual Creative Commons license, I agree. Neither am I. Indeed, I think it was wrong to give free and non-free licenses the same initial name, that of `Creative Commons'. The language is confusing. Rhetoric becomes very important in persuading people who mostly are not listening, who do not care much, and who are not professionals in the subject matter, such as music creation or software. For Emacs, what advantages does the GFDL have over (say) Creative Commons Plain Attribution or Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike? The two reasons I said before: first, that when FSF is dealing with the actual licenses of others, those two do not count. The license that counts is restricted. Please remember, neither you nor I are defining this issue. Second, as I said above, when dealing with strangers, language counts. Again, this is only about the application of the GFDL to Emacs, *not* about the GFDL in general. Right. This is what I am talking about: the application of the GFDL to Emacs. Note that my elisions are telling: I am not talking about the application of the GFDL to Emacs in a small community of like-minded programmers, as some thought the Emacs community was 20 years ago. Nor I am talking about the application of the GFDL to Emacs in a larger community that is harmless to Emacs. Unhappily, I am talking about the application of the GFDL to Emacs in the current world, its default circumstances. -- Robert J. Chassell bob(a)rattlesnake.com GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc