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

"Ben Wing" <ben(a)666.com&gt; writes: Uh, no. It is relevant to XEmacs. Since you more or less stated that XEmacs developers are not to be bothered with issues like licences, it is somewhat unclear what factual problem you would have with changing the XEmacs manual licence to the GFDL. That you don't feel like it is not really sufficient. To the extent that your problems are related to actual practical considerations instead of "we liked the older licence better and did not bother asking contributors whether they'd go with changes, since they better be fine anyhow", they might also be relevant to Emacs. It is my personal opinion that by far the most prominent distribution channel for the Emacs manual is as part of Emacs, and so it should also be available under the GPL (which would probably not help your case, incidentally). I'd be somewhat less inclined to state the same thing for the Elisp tutorial: that is more like being a separate piece of software, not as tightly integrated as either the Elisp manual and the Emacs manual are with Emacs. The question to solve for the licences of Emacs are what benefits Emacs first, and free software in general second. Licences like the GPL and the GFDL retain their force by having relevant software with suitable copyright owners willing to defend them. The FSF maintains a large and significant body of free software as the sole copyright holder, and it is paying a high price for it: the price is that the FSF itself is unable to reap the benefits of the GPL. It can't reincorporate third party contributions without explicit assignment. The GPL implies the freedom to fork. XEmacs developers have decided to make use of that freedom, and have by the same token decided that they would make use of that freedom also by relaxing their contribution criteria and maintaining diversified copyrights, partly not even tracking them. Which you were free to do. A different significant fork from FSF-maintained software was egcs. The egcs project, in contrast, decided that they would not simplify matters in a similar way: copyright assignments to the FSF were diligently maintained. As a result, this fork was able to get merged with the FSF's own variant of GCC again. Of course, egcs developers already had seen the consequences of the Emacs/XEmacs fork, so it was easier for them to decide differently. Now with regard to the discussion on this list, it has not made apparent by you a) why the GFDL is a bad choice for Emacs manuals (I myself have offered some opinions about that, but those mostly hold equally for the previous licence). b) why it would be technically impossible for you to change the XEmacs manual licence to the GFDL: it does not seem like you have handed out any written assurances that the licence is never going to change. My personal guess would be "we don't like the licence". Neither do I for this purpose and have explained why. But my dislike would be for the old version of the licence, too. It is pointless to say "well, everybody else but us should be affected by the GFDL, so please give us an exception". If there are arguments good enough for you, they should also be good enough for everybody else. So please explain in detail what concrete problems you would have with a licence change that other users and developers of free software could reasonably also be expected to have. As long as this is not particularly connected with Emacs itself, but rather a general dislike of the GFDL, I have to agree with Richard that this group does not seem the right place for it. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum