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

"Robert J. Chassell" <bob(a)rattlesnake.com&gt; writes: Well, but that's no reason to cheer the good guys when they are shooting themselves and their friends in the foot. Anyway, could we keep off the picturesque rhetoric? If there is nothing new to say about the topic, nothing is gained by repeating the already said things in an obfuscated way. I guess we more or less got our differing points of view presented. We have two different problems: A) Emacs changed its manual licence from the old licence to the GFDL, and XEmacs can't or does not want to easily follow suit without contacting _their_ contributors. B) Both the old as well as the new Emacs manual licence are GPL-incompatible and thus present problems for integrating work on the manual and the code for derived works that are not copyrighted all by the same legal entity. It would appear to me that "A" is not something that we can reasonably deal with in isolation: if we accompany every change of the licence of the Emacs manual with an exception for old times' sakes, there is no point in changing the licence in the first place. However, A is in some manner an outgrowth of problem B, and if we got B solved in a satisfactory way, it might mean that XEmacs developers (like everybody else) would need to adapt at most _one_ more time. One proposal of mine was dual GFDL/GPL licencing which still has the disadvantage that third party code can be pulled into the manual by others only while sacrificing the GFDL licence, so we probably will still have the FSF as the primary responsible (non-public) source for GFDL manuals. It has the advantage that it can be accomplished rather fast, and the disadvantage that it does not seem to solve any of the more _urgent_ problems right now (certainly not the problem of the XEmacs developers, except that they might be less uncomfortable with the necessary relicensing then). On the long run, I'd hope that the next version of the GPL would become suitable to cover the generated of printed manuals in a satisfactory way without the need for a separate licence. However, this will take quite long, and it does not appear to me that Richard thinks it feasible at all. Other choices are to let things stay as they are right now. All of those choices don't look very appealing. And there is little sense in dressing them up with rhetoric about how free software and its licences are either great or completely irrelevant. Whether they are great or irrelevant, we still have to pick them, and the cases have more or less been made. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum